Powerbook Test: 550 vs. 400.

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
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tjwett

Powerbook Test: 550 vs. 400.

Post by tjwett » Sun Apr 21, 2002 7:52 pm

here's a post I made on the Apple message board regarding a test I did with a friend using his Powerbook G4 400 vs. my 550 using Live as the benchmark. This subject seems to come up alot so I thought people might like to see it.
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"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. "
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i've been bummed ever since.

Guest

Post by Guest » Mon Apr 22, 2002 11:01 am

Hi tjwett,
Great info... well-researched stuff like this is what those wanting to buy laptops nee.

ThanQ

Roland

Guest

Post by Guest » Mon Apr 22, 2002 11:02 am

Hi tjwett,
Great info... well-researched stuff like this is what those wanting to buy laptops need.

ThanQ

Roland

everamzah

Post by everamzah » Thu Apr 25, 2002 1:05 am

what about things like hard drive defrag amount?

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Post by FORMAT » Thu Apr 25, 2002 8:16 am

What do you mean by harddrive defrag amount? If it's fragmented you defrag it.... simple

Confused,
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tjwett
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not sure either but...

Post by tjwett » Thu Apr 25, 2002 8:47 am

i'm not sure what you mean by that...if you mean that one HD was more fragmented than the other, it wasn't. We each ran an "Index" of our HDs before the test. It's called "Indexing" on a Mac.

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