Folks, I have two Macs of roughly the same vintage available to me, I'm just not sure which would be better for the intended use of running Photoshop.
Basically I'm going to be importing RAW images and having Photoshop batch process a watermark on to them.
The machines I have available to me are a MDD 1Ghz G4 PowerMac FW800 and a Dual 1Ghz PowerMac MDD.
My instinct tells me the dual machine would be better for this purpose, but I don't know how much more (if any) horsepower the FW800 processor has over the dual machine.

Mark

The Dual 1GHz has a slightly slower bus on it than the FW800 model, but I'd imagine that the fact it's got 2 chips in it would make up for that.
I say the Dual.

Is one of the Macs going to be used for other purposes while this processing is taking place? If so, I'd say give the processing job to the slower machine and let it get on with it while you work on the faster one. If, however, they'll both be free then why not split the job in two?

Sorry, I realise you probably wanted a more technical answer on the merits of the respective processors. My instinct would be the same as yours: dual = better.

I have the choice of the two machines, but I'll only have one of them. It's not going to be my main machine, just a secondary one I'll be able to leave processing while I get on with other stuff.
Thanks for the responses guys, I think I'll go with the dual machine.

Mark

After a bit of Googling, I can't find the answer I'm looking for...

If Photoshop under PPC doesn't take advantage of multiple cores, then the G4 PowerMac FW800 might be a better option because of the buss speed.

AFAIK, it does use both chips. Actually - I stand (well, sit) corrected. Looking at Lowendmac.com, the FW800 1GHZ has a bus speed of 133MHz. The Dual 1GHz should have a bus speed of 167MHz.

So definitely the Dual.

Cheers Alex. I'll go with the DP Mac then.

Mark

You can speed up either Mac by adding a drive just for use as scratch. Photoshop, badly programmed as it is likes to scrawl huge swathes of crap over a scratch disk olr partition when you ask it to do anything, even minor. This can lead to much huffing and puffing even on powerful Macs or PC's . If you have a spare disk, its worth giving this a try.

Good call. I've no real shortage of drives to put in the Mac, so I'll just pick two of the biggest I have and use one as a dedicated Photoshop scratch disk.
Thanks for that.

Mark

You don't need that big, but at least 40gb. More cache and actual speed of the disk would be more important. As they are IDE drives, you just need to work out which one is quickest that you have.

Neither. I hate Macs.

Did you hear about the 138$ box of rocks passing off dor a DSi?

Walmart should have just painted the rocks in bright colours and passed them off for Macs instead.

Ah, a troll. Welcome.
You know nothing.

ME. NO. TROLL. ME. NO. LIKE. MACS.

I'm just not a big fan of Macs duuuuuudes!

So... you're in here because...

Oh great, our first troll; and an illiterate one to boot (she even makes Gavomatic seem like a Nobel Prize winner). Now where's that "ignore" button?