[MacDV] Mac Book Pro vs. G4

[Phelim Lunny]

You'll never look back... iff you wait till the Fall when the MBP's  
get upgraded to the Core 2 Duo chip. Big difference.  BTW you also  
might want to listen in on the announcement soon (Aug 7th) about the  
new screaming fast intel Mac desktops.

PJ

On 20 Jul 2006, at 19:25, Robert & Susan Lloyd wrote:

> I have been making videos using a G4 dual tower 1.67GHz, FCE HD,  
> with several external firewire hard drives, an external vcr and a  
> TV monitor.  It has 256 KB L2 cache (per cpu), 2 MB L3 cache (per  
> cpu), 1 GB memory, a bus speed of 133 MHz. One internal ATA drive  
> of 74.53 GB, an internal Maxtor drive of 189.92 GB.  Three external  
> firewire drives, two at 500 GB and one at 112 GB.  This all seems  
> to work fine at the moment.  There are two firewire ports, two USB  
> ports.
>
> BUT I am off the grid, using solar power, and the power consumption  
> of this setup is significant, requiring me to run the backup  
> generator frequently -- long term wear on the propane generator and  
> the system batteries.  I live in Vermont, so solar power year round  
> is limited.
>
> I am wondering whether shifting to a 17" Mac Book Pro might save me  
> considerable power on the computer (not the external drives).  The  
> spec sheets suggest a maximum power consumption of 4.6 amps at 18.5  
> volts dc, which looks like 85 watts to me.   In contrast, the G4  
> line input is listed as 8 amps at 120 volts ac, which looks like  
> 960 watts (can this be true? I can't believe it uses all that  
> power!), with the ADC monitor out put of 25 volts dc at 4 amps =  
> 100 watts.
>
> Setting aside the cost for the moment, my main question is whether  
> the 17" Mac Book Pro will adequately fill my video editing needs  
> without glitches.  Compoared to the G4 Dual, the CPU is faster  
> (2.16 GHz), the internal Hard Drive is smaller (100 GB vs.  260  
> GB).  Or can I get away with the 5400 rpm, 120 GB hard drive?  It  
> can support 2 GB memory, 2GB L2 storage, and some other good  
> things.  If I make the switch from G4 to Mac Book, will I regret it?
>
> TIA.
>
> BobLL
>
>
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