Fastest G3, Quietest G4 question

[hellslinger]

This site is a lot of fun. Great advice and smart people here. Here's a couple of questions that ought to be interesting.

1. What was the fastest G3 system ever produced. I'm familiar with the 700 MHz iMac, but was there another that was faster?

2. What was the quietest G4 ever made? I know that the G4 Cube was quiet or silent, but it wasn't clocked very high and it's expensive. Are the > 1GHz PowerBooks quiet?

 

[rsolberg]

The fastest clocked Apple-shipped G3s were the 12" and 14" iBook G3 in 2003 with a 900MHz 750fx G3.

I expect the G4 Mac mini would be in the running for quietest G4. With the hard drive spun down or an SSD installed, my 1.42GHz model is extremely quiet at idle and light loads. I've found the late model aluminium PowerBooks tend to heat up more quickly and spin up their fans sooner. Once going, they both sound like hairdryers though. The iMac G4 makes a bit more noise at idle, but doesn't go hairdryer/leaf blower under load. I like my 800MHz Superdrive model with SSD installed.

 

[Elfen]

Powerbook G4 are quiet noisey! iBook G4s are quieter for some reason.

900MHz like rsolberg state is the fastest G3. 

I have my G3 iBooks with SSDs and CF/SSDs, they are quiet fast and cool! Something about the SSD that makes them run cooler.

Thing is, the G4 has I believe something called an Altech accelerator in them(?), and the G3 does not. This accelerator makes it a bit faster with certain things like media processing than the G3. Without it, they are almost the same. (I said almost, for those that like to dredge things up and flame the threads! You know who you are!)

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

It's called AltiVec (which Apple called the Velocity Engine, and IBM called VMX). The early G4 was close to the G3, the G4e (7450 and newer) were very different.

 

[Elfen]

Thank you TheWhiteFalcon. I knew it was Alt-something.

 

[trag]

Not a system, but there were 1.0 GHz and 1.1 GHz G3 upgrades in original PCI PM form and also ZIF format from Powerlogix

 

[Pandamac]

I have a G4 cube which I installed an IDE SSD 

It is totally silent now. I do have a Sonnet G4 1.25 processor upgrade but it has a fan on it which would introduce noise so I didn't install it.

I relegated my cube to OS X 10.3 and have it connected to an Apple Laserwriter writer. I was pleased that Apple used Apple Talk in OS X 10.3 as it was the last OS to support apple talk and apple printers.