Quote Originally Posted by Spam Butterfly
I've had a 1.25Ghz DP G4 up against my G5. Very similar performance.
The important things here are, as Danny states: Get a decent drive for your media.
10K SCSI drive or something.
Run the latest version of Mac OS X.3.
Get yourself a Radeon 9800.

Hugh
disc drives are the limit to performance. and it is not the headline data rate. no IDE drives are good enough. And that includes all current firewire drives.
If you can get a SATA raptor inside an external firewire 800 case - then that would probably help.
Such things are just coming onto the market.
And will help if you are planning on using a laptop.

The latest generation of scsi 10k Atlas iV drives need to be used. or Western digital raptors.
Non-raid works better. and keep the operating system separate.


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The G5 helps long term timing stability - which means your files will playback more accurately over longer time periods. And it helps with more processor intensive codecs, like photo jpeg and pixlet.
It also helps when you are using larger image sizes like 720p and 1080p.

But for standard dv file playback in non-critical timing applications - the main bottleneck is in the disc drives.