[firefly]

I have a beige G3 with a G4 533, 256MB RAM, Radeon 7000 and 40GB Barracuda ATA IV. In OS9 it is fine, but now that I want to use OSX more I am finding it a big headache.

Its just so sluggish - in terms of responsiveness, especially graphically (and booting, which takes almost 2 minutes). I would have thought that on a machine like this (which isnt that bad) it would be a fair amount more usable, but it seems that the CPU is just not fast enough to cope with the OS. I havent used other Macs of a similar spec in X to compare with so I dont know - is this the case?

I will definitely be adding another 256MB RAM soon, but should I bother with a PCI ATA/66 + card? Is the 16.6MB IDE interface actually too slow as to significantly hinder performance?

(I have enabled backside cache and Altivec for the CPU. It is clocked at 541 on an 83MHz bus.)

[exa]

I have a similar setup with 512MB RAM and yes, it is quite slow. The only additional thing you can do is to enable quartz extreme pci hack.

I think the real bottleneck is the bus and lack of AGP really.

[terrancew_hod]

Those with PCI-based graphic cards are going to suffer in Jaguar. While it wasn't that bad with 10.1, QE makes things worse. Working with Jaguar with my old PM8500 was an execise in patience with some routines.

Those graphic routines need to be cleaned up a bit in Panther.

[a2daj]

Even without the QE hack for PCI cards 10.2 exhibits GUI optimizations which were not present in 10.1.

[OreoCookie]

1. Bus too slow, no QE graphics card

Hacking QE to accept a PCI graphics card can even make your system slower. All the textures (aka windows, dialogs, etc.) will have to be pushed through your PCI bus which (practically) tops out at 100 MB/s (for all cards, e. g. PCI ATA card for newer harddrives!).

2. Too little memory. Everything above 512 Megs is usable.

Verdict: Machine is too old. Even when upgrading it to the max, it's too old.

[booboo]

I didn't find my Beige G3 too bad with OS X,

The extra RAM will definitely help, but, if you feel up to it, you could try upping the bus speed to 83MHz. This may mean changing [lowering] the bus speed multiplier on your G4 card...

[D'Espice]

Originally posted by firefly:
I will definitely be adding another 256MB RAM soon, but should I bother with a PCI ATA/66 + card? Is the 16.6MB IDE interface actually too slow as to significantly hinder performance?

That'll definitely make your machine a lot faster. Going from 7200rpm 40GB to 2*40GB 7200rpm RAID 0 was like buying a new Mac in my case - OS X loves fast harddrives and 16.6MB/s is definitely way too slow.

Another 256MB of RAM, a PCI ATA66 or ATA100 card and a fast 7200rpm harddrive (like Seagate Barracuda IV or Western Digital w/ 8MB Cache) and it'll feel like a new computer.


I'd steer clear of the QuartzExtreme PCI hack though, in most cases it may increase graphics performance however it decreases overall performance. The PCI-bus is slow, only 133MB/s minus overhead which leaves us with only 110 MB/s. And since almost everything is connected via PCI (IDE, LAN, Firewire, USB, everything) enabling QE will leave you with only about 20-30MB/s for the rest of your hardware - ergo it's not worth it, it may decrease overall performance big time.

[firefly]

Sicne I already have a fast Seagate Barracuda ATA IV, the ATA card seems a good idea. Any recommendations as to which I should get (preferably cheap)...

How good is Acard?

And are there any PC ones that can be flashed?

[D'Espice]

It doesn't matter which one you get as long as it's Mac-compatible. As far as I know Acard is pretty decent. However there are no cheap PC cards that can be flashed.

[j mars]

I am running a simular beige (533 G4 w/768MB ram, Radeon) and do not find it that slow. Do up your ram 512 at least. By all means run Quartz Extreme on the Radeon, you might also try Grackle probe, it helps as well. Os 9 will always seem snappier, but Jaguar runs fine for me. I am more annoyed by the loss of serial and SCSI ports.

[D'Espice]

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