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In and of itself, 10.4.9 should work fine. I hope you have lots of RAM, of course. The main pros, imho, are support for newer versions of various freeware/shareware apps, which sometimes require 10.3 or 10.4. Safari, also.

I was happy with iTunes 2.0. I'm really not too happy with the increasing bloat - I have a 2 GHz machine, a smurfing MP3 player shouldn't lag me.

10.4 is faster than 10.3 was on my Gigabyte G4. My understanding is that the optimization in 10.3 benefited both G3 and G4 cpus but the optimization in 10.4 only helped G4s.
10.3 ran surprisingly well on my old G3 266 but I had 640 meg of ram and I think ram is critical. 512 in a bare minimum, like 16meg was in 1998. A gig today is like 32 meg was back then.

Sounds like most G4s starting at 500 MHZ or above should be ok. Below 500 (G4 sawtooths, PCI graphics, G3s) – slow probably.

adamjg wrote:

Sounds like most G4s starting at 500 MHZ or above should be ok. Below 500 (G4 sawtooths, PCI graphics, G3s) – slow probably.

Quartz Extreme graphics are important too. Even with the 1.5 GHz CPU if I swap in the old Rage 128 it feels like the system is swimming in molasses. For UI smoothness and responsiveness the difference between a Radeon 8500 and a Rage128 is like adding another CPU.

The GF2MX supports Quartz Extreme. I'm pretty sure it will work in either an AGP 2x or 4x slot.

I was going to install it on my 533 MHZ G4 DA, 768 RAM. I have Panther now. I just don't want to overwhelm it. Maybe I should get a 1 GHZ or higher CPU first or at least up it to 1 GIG RAM or both first.

BTW, is there a way to turn off Dashboard in 10.4? I heard someone mention that was the thing you could do to gain performance. It would be good to know about other options that you can disable (such as filesharing and Appletalk) to increase speed as well.

Last edited by adamjg (2007-04-12 8:33 pm)

If you are happy with Panther on that system then Tiger will be OK too. You will notice a lot of hard disk thrashing and it may seem pretty sluggish for the first few hours. This is Spotlight indexing the hard drive(s). Once indexing is done everything should run pretty much as it did with Panther.

To turn off Dashboard you can use TinkerTool or the Terminal.

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

Will disable Dashboard.

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

Will enable it.

I can't comment on other brands but I put an OWC 1.5 GHz in my Sawtooth and it just works. No drivers, no firmware upgrades needed, OS X updates don't break it. Plug and play.

sign up for owc specials email, and then you can get sale stuff another $10 or more off at times.

G3/300 512MB RAM, 20 + 80 GB HD's, SUPER DRIVE...10.4.9 @ 1280x1024@thousands(for speed) 21" Studio Display: very useable.

I run safari and use it as a back up machine for clients. It's a horribly stable setup that somehow keeps going; no matter what I throw at it.

iTunes runs slower, but even with visuals at this color depth, it will even flip through album work useably. I however normally run iTunes in random mode, with the mini-player up. That's outed to a Pioneer Reciver and two 9" cones. It's a multitasking mad haus.

On the G3 iMac Tiger does not have any graphic performance improvements I can see. The extra stuff like Coverflow may actually slow it down, but that isn't a Tiger specific thing. Basically, Tiger runs about as well as Panther on the two Macs I have access to.

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