Need New Hardware, P4 or Athlon, and PC or Apple Laptop

[BlakkIce]

Im looking to build a computer strictly for Graphic Design until 30 min ago i was going to order a p4 2.4c with a gig a ram then one of my friends suggested an athlon may be better for rendering with video, photoshop, and maya. so what do you suggest P4 or Athlon XP Barton, now my next thing is a laptop, i was going to get a centrino Sony Z1 but for cheaper and maybe better i can get either a powerbook or an Ibook, which one will be better, what i will be using my laptop is showing my clients their work and doing minor graphic work, what do you suggest

 

[magomago]

Originally posted by: BlakkIce
Im looking to build a computer strictly for Graphic Design until 30 min ago i was going to order a p4 2.4c with a gig a ram then one of my friends suggested an athlon may be better for rendering with video, photoshop, and maya. so what do you suggest P4 or Athlon XP Barton, now my next thing is a laptop, i was going to get a centrino Sony Z1 but for cheaper and maybe better i can get either a powerbook or an Ibook, which one will be better, what i will be using my laptop is showing my clients their work and doing minor graphic work, what do you suggest

I'm all for AMD but love them but athlon does get raped hard in graphic design - get the 2.4c and if you are going to do a lot of more video/photoshop/mayaing you might want to consider 2 gigs of ram


as for laptop I wouldn't get one for graphic work - use your P4 for that. If its mac laptop don't get the fruity looking ones...get that sleek titanium or something

but i'd say mac because you know that you won't get a BSOD or any kind of error and I think that should be of utmost concern when picking something that you'll use to show off to your clients...

 

[BlakkIce]

anyone else, so where does the athlon perform well

 

[Eug]

If you get a PC laptop, get nothing but PM Centrino. P4M is only OK, but no match for Centrino, and the desktop P4 laptops suck royally. Right now the sweet spot for price/performance is something like 1.5 GHz.

I prefer Mac laptops though. They won't be as fast as a 1.7 GHz Centrino, but they are extremely well built. And I just flashed my DVD burner on my Titanium PowerBook to do higher speeds: 2X DVD-R, 1X DVD-R, and 16X CD-R. I wouldn't buy anything less than a 1 GHz G4, which removes the possibility of a G3 iBook, even though they're quite sturdy.

Note that the 1.25-1.33 GHz G4 7457 PowerBooks are due out within the next month or so. I'd wait for those. The 7457 has twice the L2 cache than the 7455 in current PowerBooks. Also, the 7457 is 0.13 um. The 7455 is 0.18 um. I suspect the 15" Titanium PowerBook will be replaced by a 15" Aluminum PowerBook with 802.11g and BlueTooth. The 12" and 17" PowerBooks already have these features.

 

[Macro2]

The Athlon performs very well on graphic design. That's what we use. Beware of Intels optomised benchmarks. <cough> Next thing you know they will come out with a benchmark that runs MSBLAST in the background.