My fiance is a graphic designer who is starting to pick up some freelance work. I was thinking about buying her a newer mac to use at home for the freelancing. She currently has a powermac g3, and it works fine, but I was thinking something faster may be better. The question is, how much power do we need? I've been looking at g4's on ebay and there seems to be a large range of processor speeds available (just page one of an ebay search for powermac g4 ranges from 450MHZ to DUAL G4 1 Ghz). I think the g5's are certainly more power than we need and I was hoping for something under or around $1000. All she will be using is photoshop, illustator, quark, and maybe indesign. Possibly dreamweaver. A lot of the macs seem to be geared for video editing nowadays, and we certainly won't be doing any of that. Will a 450Mhz g4 be noticeably better than her 350Mhz g3? I would like a faster system but I don't want to buy more than we need. Around what processor speed would you recommend for efficient and stable use of graphic design applications? Thanks!

I would aim for over 1Ghz if you can. I would recommend
you sell the G3 (once you get your data off it and reformat
of course), keep your existing monitor, and get a second
hand G4 733 or above.

Other things that would make the computer run faster
(especially with those high end applications she is using)
you will need the maximum RAM, and plenty of space on
the hard drive. Also I'm assuming she has a DVD burner?
If not, upgrade to a Pioneer 107 or 108 for dual layer
burning.

I have a blue and white G3 350 with 1GB RAM (maximum)
and a 120GB hard drive (with around 60GB spare). It runs
Dreamweaver, photoshop, illustrator etc quite well.

I don't know how much they're going for in the states but I
just bought a second hand Quicksilver 933 Mhz G4 with
1024 RAM (very important to get a lot of RAM if you want
to use specialised software) and 180GB hard disk with a
19" monitor for 1100 euros. I think that sort of
configuration would be very adequate for graphics design,
but she could do with less power (down to 733 which
exist in quicksilver - 450 won't last her very long) and
maybe a little less hard drive if her needs are not as great
as mine.

schnub