[switchah]

Purchasing advice quesion:

I have seen used 1.6Ghz G5 powermacs for sale with the original non-crippled FSB of 900Mhz.

Are these machines faster than the newer generation 1.8's with the 600Mhz FSB?

This question brought to you by Apple marketing

[Luca]

They're probably VERY similar in performance. Some things will be faster on the 1.6, others faster on the 1.8. Since the bus primarily links the CPU to the RAM, I guess things that involve lots of RAM would be faster on the 1.6, while pure CPU activities that don't deal with a lot of data (such as pure number crunching, distributed clients and the like) would be faster on the 1.8.

I'd look for a single 1.8 with the 900 MHz bus (the 1.6 would have an 800 MHz bus, not 900 MHz), but those are probably pretty rare since they were only made for a few months.