G4 or G5

[soundtechdan]

hi

This is just out of curiosity but I was looking on Ebay and spotted that there are power mac G4 computer on there for £65 pound buy out with nothing wrong with them. I then decided to have a look at power mac G5 which were going for alot more money nearly £800-£1000. Now would it be better to save up the money for a G5 or could you buy a G4 and spend the money on other things and still have just a good setup as that with a G5. Just wondered on people thoughts.

cheers

dan

[Nik Harrison]

Depends entirely on what you want it to do. There is nothing wrong with any computer going all the way back to the invention of the computer, but what has been expected of each generation of machine has been markedly different. Dependant on what you want it to do, a G4 will be an excellent choice, unless you really need a G5's power.

[soundtechdan]

well say for just a home studio setup, so basic say 8 input being recorded at one time, maybe audio plugins and midi. Would it be possible also to run a whole studio recording such as 16 track runnin at the same time with it?

cheers

dan

[Ten Flew South]

You can get a G5 cheaper than that second hand. I've jusr seen one, dual 2Ghz, 1.5GB ram, 250GB hd for £575.

[soundtechdan]

yes but its still not as cheap at £50 pounds for a G4.

[jim_branning]

dont touch either

i just spent a few days living with an old G4 someone gave me cos i'm thinking to get a mac now and wanted to at least have some private time to evaluate the OS. This G4 will run Logic PRO 8 with some system tweaks and some tweaks to Logic's preferences files but with not much resources.. I can mix 20 tracks on it (44.1) with about 4 channel comps, 4 channel eq's, a Platignum reverb, tape delay, and a few other plugs. Or I can run say ultrabeat and a vocoder and some other bits.. but it's only an old Grey pci g4 running at 380-something Mhz with 512mb of old pc100 ram I bunged into it from an old P3 (worked fine)

so yes you can get faster G4's but they will never have enuff grunt

G5's also a waste of time for the money that is cos they had a bad memory buss problem noone at Mac could ever fix which is why they were underpowered junk. So the price might seem decent and the spec might seem decent, but you wont get the power you expect.

Best to get an Imac intel core2duo. Plenty on ebay for 500-600 quid, plenty of power to do a decent mix if you get some ram in it & you get the screen included of course and they are silent (G5's arent).

as for 8 inputs, well of course you'll need to get an appropriate firewire or usb2 device, thats the only caveat, but ram is VERY cheap for the intel macs and so are firewire external drives for bumping the storage

look for the fastest imac core2duo you can...but not for ram amounts just the best processor. You can buy ram kits dead cheap from Dabs or whoever

[soundtechdan]

you have some good points of which I did not know about but it seem like what I have seen and heard that everyone seem to me trying to get more and more power when most of the time they don't need it.

It wasn't long ago that we thought that the G4 was one of the most power computer out there. Well I did anyway. This was more than enough for most people need. I think I worked at a Pro-tool studio with a G4 and I recently seen an amazing studio running with logic studio 5 and an old Pc.

I mean at the moment I'm running ableton live 7 on a PC that's about 5 years old and wasn't one of the best at its time and it still run more than fine for my setup. I am trying to build on my setup and maybe either a new computer (hopefully mac) or boost up my computer would be better but I think i'm happy with my PC (well I would prefer a mac).

[Danny1969]

If your familiar with PT then a G4 with some Mix cards is fine, I haven't run out of power yet when doing typical band recordings. A typical project is normally about 30 to 40 tracks with a lot of TDM plugs. A lot of studios still run G4's and a lot of records have been made on them. In terms of recording audio the computer doesn't really need any power, just a fast seperate audio drive for up to about 64 tracks or so.

For Logic on a G4 you could record as many audio tracks as you like within reason, but you would lack power for plugins and virtual intruments. There's a big difference in G4 models as well, the later AGP digital audio models are far quicker than the first 350Mhz ish models. A G5 is a very quick machine but check it supports the cards you want to use. Almost all G5's won't support 5V cards as they only have 3.3V support.

It's funny how some software these days seems to require so much power, I can remember recording 24 track band projects in Cubase VST with a 233MMX PC that had 64Mb of ram

[G9]

I would go for an Intel Mac, to be safe. They've been around for a while, and G5's are even further back in the timeline. Seems like you're low on the budget... just hit up a 20" iMac.

[Gdoubleyou]

Benchmarks show that even the mac Mini is more powerful that the last Dual G5s Powermacs released.