SAMs 440/460

[zylesea]

how many windows can morphos do for composition/3d with a 32mb radeon 9250 vs a radeonhd 4650 1gb on my sam build amigaos 4.1 when your running a 1920x1200 screen?

Well, a using 1680x1050 resolution and have the 64 MB version, but one is for sure: it's enough windows to have a big mess on your screen...
I.e. theoretically the 64 MB are a limitation, but practically you'll only pretty rarely run into these situations. Nevertheless I agree, the 32Mb are a bit little though. But the 1.5 GHz Mac minis are cheap these days (several times seen them going for ~180 EUR). Also enhanced display is not that big benefit in everyday usage IMHO. I disabled it on several screens.
Anyway, get a Powermac G4 and you have a wider choice for gfx cards.
About the RAM: usually my 1 GB is used for about 20-35% goes up to 50% sometimes and close to never exceeds 60%.

Btw.: Can OS4 address 2 GB RAM and 1 GB VRAM (like in your said 4650)?

Anyway, I think genrally the Sams are rather nice little maschines, but IMHO the price/perfomance ratio is prohibitive.

[zylesea]

and I imagine my crap off the shelf linux PC will outperform any morph machine without breaking a sweat.

Is this suddenly the late 90's again, where everything was about who have the biggest numbers on a piece of paper ?

No, it's not the specs on paper, but real life usage. MY 1.5 GHz is fast enough to let me do my everyday things. It is fats enough to do all internet things (think of youtube for example, but also about loading times on heavy pages like maps.google.* or ebay.*. On alow spec maschine these things aint big fun. What about hd video (I can replay 720p with a demanding codec) ? mp3 encoding? compiling? huge pdfs? euae? Hollywood (that one pretty demanding if you actually use it, my last project actually requires more than 1 GHz to run okay). For that I need juice!
I am happy the G4 1500 has enough power to do many things nicely, but I will probably get*an additional G5 once G5 maschines are supported. I see the contrast to low power everyday (also have an Efika which I use much). It is not that you cannot have fun with low power, too (I really like my Efika). But from my experience I can sum it up to a very short formula: the more juice, the better¹.

--
¹ Of course that calculation is a bit blunt, you need to take power consumption, price, size and all these things into consideration. But as long as you sit in front of a monitor a fast system is always better than a slower one. I cannot imagine a single task that runs better on a slow maschine.

[zylesea]

But then we're back to "why use any of this stuff, and not just use a modern PC?"

Easy: Because I can continue to use a computer system I am used to (MorphOS/Amiga) since 20+ years and that just follows my logic. And for these prerequesite I want the best I can get. Maybe it's debatable whether AROS or MorphOS rule here. AROS has the more powerful hw, MorphOS the more matured OS + apps.

[zylesea]

I dont consider macmini video card adequate enough, I had a 128mb ram 9250 on my efika and that was fine with mos. but the common 32mb, no, and even the 64mb on 1.5ghz I dont consider good enough

AFAIK OS4 can address 256 MB VRAM maximally. That's more than MorphOS (currently 128 MB VRAM max). And what about RAM: Is OS4 able to address more than 1.5 GB RAM?