Performance Specs on my new Powerbook G4 - 867 12" vers

robtronik · Post by **robtronik** » Thu Feb 06, 2003 5:35 am

Been reading the board alot and digging Live. Despite the performance gains proven on the PC platform, the fit and finish and amazing OS that Apple now has made me want to go the Powerbook route. I know it will run live and traktor just fine...but there are a lot of people wanting to know the performance specs of this new machine so....here they are! Ta da...

Apple Powerbook g4 - 12" Aluminum Book
OS X (10.2.3)
867 mghz
640 MB RAM

Test 3: 3% (Live 2 Demo Arrangement loaded, but not playing)
Test 4: 32% (Live 2 Demo Arrangement playing and reported at bar 42)

High, but decent enough. Since Ableton has committed verbally on this forum to do some Altivec enhancements, then it will get better eventually. But nothing really beats my Airport extreme card (w/ my basestation downstairs) and this tight metal case that looks freakin' sexy....I'm sitting around my house doing production and playing with live while surfing the internet (i.e. this message board) and just loving it.

Amazing machine.

Really.

I'll be very happy to have this thing with me on my live DJ gig performances.

Gotta love that glowing apple symbol.

rob.

FORMAT · Post by **FORMAT** » Thu Feb 06, 2003 12:43 pm

robotnik

good to hear you're happy! I get only marginally better results on my new 867 15" Ti

Cheers,
forma.a.t

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Thu Feb 06, 2003 5:00 pm

format, in all honesty. would you have gotten the mac if logic was not only a mac program now?

robtronik · Post by **robtronik** » Thu Feb 06, 2003 6:57 pm

One of the things that I find interesting is how Live reports CPU load.

It is VERY different from the Process Viewer app (in the utilities folder in OS X) that shows CPU usage.

Live might report a 33% CPU usage, but the process viewer app reports 40 to 50 percent usage.

How is this possible? Which one is more correct? I would tend to believe that the OS X Processor Viewer app is more correct as it monitors all threads and CPU activity....

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

rob.

Schmidi · Post by **Schmidi** » Thu Feb 06, 2003 11:31 pm

Robotrik,
Can you give us an idea of how live + other audio apps handle at the same time? I'm talking live with 4-6 trax, a few live plugs (filters, delay) and say logic or reason with a vsti or 2 open. Is it still useable at this point, or does it get to chunky control wise?
Also does it perform like you think an 867 would? Cause the 550-667 powerbooks also had no lvl 3 cache and this REALLY ruined thier audio performance. Any comments?

I'm lappy shopping at the moment and I'm torn between a 12" ti or a rediculously powerful sager desktop replacement.

FORMAT · Post by **FORMAT** » Fri Feb 07, 2003 11:50 am

Anonymous wrote:format, in all honesty. would you have gotten the mac if logic was not only a mac program now?

Maybe, maybe not....

I spent enough time gathering knowledge about audio notebooks that I can confidently say that I don't - and probably won't - regret it.

I paid a lot of money to cross over from Cubase, so going back or using Sonar would not have been an option.

form.aat

astromass · Post by **astromass** » Sat Feb 08, 2003 5:50 am

hi:
does the 4200rpm harddrive on the 12" hinder recording?
thanks, +()Dd

Maxim · Post by **Maxim** » Sat Feb 08, 2003 1:08 pm

robtronik: I think it works like this: Live just claims (almost) all processing power to assure they get top priority. It's the ugly way to do it. So basically it takes over the system and then handles its own performance meter. By doing this it can be sure no other app or process is able to claim the processor intensively. This results in more speed and stability in live.

I think this is one example of an ugly ported windows program. It works and it is fine by me. But if it was natively written for X this wouldn't be the case. And then it would also run better in conjunction with apps like reason or logic.

cr · Post by cr » Sat Feb 08, 2003 11:02 pm

why does everyone keep claiming live is a 'ported pc app'? is it just beacuse performance is so much worse on mac? all indications i get using it is that its a mac app, ported to pc, take that how you will in regards to performance. the lack of right click menus is total mac. the key shortcuts for various things like copying chunks etc are all mac-style, and usually different than the keystrokes youd expectin a normal pc app, the windows explorer, cubase sx, etc. my money is on it either began on the mac, or was designed from the beginning for both...

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sun Feb 09, 2003 8:46 am

cr- it was originally coded on pc.

robtronik · Post by **robtronik** » Tue Feb 11, 2003 6:37 am

hmmm....thanks for the explanation concerning the CPU load.

That makes some sense...

But it is still disconcerting.

What is really weird is how little system resources and CPU Reason takes to run a very complex song and multiple tracks, but yet Live takes up much more CPU for comparitively less complex arrangements.

This must mean that there is a lot going on under the hood for audio file manipulation.

It really would be nice if Ableton did do some Altivec enhancments. Even a few percentage points gained in CPU usage would help since I am running the application with Traktor 2 (which uses approximately 40 t0 50% CPU as well - it also is not Altivec enhanced....)

Saving a total of 15 to 20% w/ both apps Altivec enhanced would be great .... in fact, it would be perfect.

I hope it happens soon!

It will be interesting to see how well Protools LE 6 runs as far as CPU usage goes. I'll report that for grins just for the heck of it.

rob.

dirtystudios · Post by **dirtystudios** » Wed Feb 12, 2003 7:42 pm

alex explained the difference between the process veiwer and live's cpu meter here:

http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic. ... highlight=

k

Performance Specs on my new Powerbook G4 - 867 12" vers

Performance Specs on my new Powerbook G4 - 867 12" version.

Interesting...

cool how about other tests?

Yo, hit me up with some Altivec!