10 years ago I compared the IO performance of a 450Mhz G4 running Yellowdog Linux to a PIII 700 Mhz server running RedHat, and the G4 literally blew the PC out

10 years ago I compared the IO performance of a 450Mhz G4 running Yellowdog Linux to a PIII 700 Mhz server running RedHat, and the G4 literally blew the PC out of water IO-wise (disk, RAM and network performance), particularly running MySQL benchmarks, though slower in raw computing speed. So it depends upon your applications I guess, and your OS.