How does a 1.25ghz G4 167 mhz bus hold up against a intel 1.25ghz?
I've heard in the past that Powerpc is much more efficient and thus is greater than an intel 1.25ghz

I'm really new to all things mac, help!

specify which intel... you arent being very decriptive are we talking P3, P4, celeron, P4 HT, P4 DP, core duo, core 2 duo...

PowerPC chips are extremely efficient compared to Intel chips...ONLY IF programmers make applications that take advantage of Power PC codes (Adobe is famous for PowerPC optimizations killing the Intel version of the same application).

The reason for this is that PPC chips use a shorter pipeline than the Intel chips (well, the earlier chips). The current Intel chips aren't as pimp-happy with clock speeds though, and Intel has figured out that it needs to make their chips do more at lower clock speeds rather than just pimp fast hos, er, chips.

Typically a G4 chip will be 1.5 times faster than its P equivalent, meaning that 1.25 GHz chip is comparable to a 1.875 GHz P4.

The G4 is a very efficient chip. It definitely beats the pentium 4, clock for clock. By quite a margin, like 50%, like A Nonny Moose said

However the Pentium M and Celeron M (mobile range of cpu's) are very competitive. They are about equal to the G4 in speed, per mhz.

Plus the Intel 1.25 will probably be either an old P4 or P3, which may run OSX. But the G4 will make the Tiger *roar*, maybe even make Leopard *meow* too.

Well, a 1.5ghz will equate fairly well to a 2.8ghz P4

thanks for the responses, i have sorta a better idea now of how to compare the two.

i've been looking into getting a low-end imac G4 and was just trying to figure out what kind of performance I could expect. I don't plan on using it for anything except to get to know OSX better and use iLife apps.

Hi Branman900:

My home-built OSx86 Box running Celeron D has similar benchmarks (using XBench) to MacMini Core Solo.

Check out X-Bench for lists of all types of machines:
http://xbench.com/