"live" on the G4 550 Powerbook

st1040 · Post by **st1040** » Mon Apr 15, 2002 10:31 pm

Hi i'm wanting to find out from people running
"live"and "live"+"reason" on the G4 550 powerbook,
just how many tracks/fx they are managing to run
before it gets unstable, as i'm looking at buying one, any advice welcome cheers.

tjwett · Post by **tjwett** » Tue Apr 16, 2002 12:17 am

hey,
i'm using Live and Reason on the Ti550 and I've been posting like crazy to figure out a way to get more tracks at once. here's a post i made in a discussion i was having on the Apple site about the same thing. My friend and I tested his Powerbook G4 400 against my 550 and the results were depressing:
We did a test today, albeit unscientific, but still a test indeed. We each opened a new Live session and began to load the same 4 bar drum loop at 100bpm onto ordered tracks from 1 up. I got to 9 tracks and the Live CPU meter was at 51%. His was at 28%. We rounded up to an even 10 tracks and mine hit 55% and his it 30%. We then began to add a line effect called Grain Delay to each playing track. By the time I got to track 3 my level was touching 75% and his was at %41%. My interface became so slow I couldn't really do much else. I didn't experience any audio breakup or noise. Live makes audio playback priority over screen redraw so it stays solid. My friend was able to get a total of 23 tracks going all with the effect before his meter hit %75. We did the test again in OSX and the results were similar.
My machine: G4 Titanium 550 w/384 mb RAM
His machine: G4 Titanium 400 w/384 mb RAM
Neither of us had any other open apps or network connections at all. Needless to say I was astounded and I'm seriously considering trading DOWN for one of these old books.

SongCarver · Post by **SongCarver** » Tue Apr 16, 2002 12:51 am

I am a 550 user, if you find out any more info on this, please post.

Why is this??

davemanning · Post by **davemanning** » Tue Apr 16, 2002 2:41 am

SongCarver wrote: I am a 550 user, if you find out any more info on this, please post.

Why is this??

The 400 and 500MHz PowerBook G4 units have a full 1MB of onboard cache, running at half the speed of the processor,whereas the new 550 and 667 units have 256K of cache running at the same speed as the processor. In any application that requires lots of computation - audio, video, etc. - cache is king!

That's why.

Dave

tjwett · Post by **tjwett** » Tue Apr 16, 2002 4:46 am

i'm assuming that we'll be seing some new Powerbooks at MWNY and I wonder if they'll address this issue by possibly raising the cache again or using the old style chip with the shorter pipe. i hope they do something...

tjwett · Post by **tjwett** » Tue Apr 16, 2002 4:49 am

here's another test(probably a bit more professional than mine) sizing up the RevAs vs. the RevBs. The results are pretty staggering.
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems/Powe ... html#logic

Yon · Post by **Yon** » Wed Apr 17, 2002 11:41 pm

More generally, most folks are finding
that the revB (550/667) powerbooks are, relative
to clock speed, substantially slower than
their predecessors, presumably for cache
reasons. I get similar performance to the
667 out of my pismo 500 g3 powerbook.

-Yon

Yon · Post by **Yon** » Wed Apr 17, 2002 11:42 pm

Sorry.. I meant "slower for audio processing"..

probably for other kinds of applications, the
relative performance is better.
-Yon
[/quote]

SongCarver · Post by **SongCarver** » Wed Apr 17, 2002 11:51 pm

hey Yon, would you say it is worth changing over a 550 for a 500 machine??

FORMAT · Post by **FORMAT** » Fri Apr 19, 2002 8:52 am

Yon,
I read your reply to my Sony 16" question; are you indeed a multi-platform guy??? Do you own a titanium?

FORMAT

[email protected] · Post by **[email protected]** » Fri Apr 19, 2002 11:56 am

"are you indeed a multi-platform guy???
Do you own a titanium?"

Um.. yes and no, I guess. I have a Pismo
G3 500 powerbook, and an Athlon 1.2GHz desktop.
(should also mention I work for Ableton..)

The G4500 powerbook appears to be faster
for audio use than either of the two new
models. (And significantly faster than the
G4 550!) Theres some information at
XLR8yourmac.com , in the Max/MSP forums at
Cycling74.com , and probably elsewhere
on the internet too.

Many of the new PC laptops are significantly
faster than the Mac ones, for CPU-performance
limited applications (and to some extent memory
performance limited ones), which should not
come as a big surprise.

-Yon