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You are here: MacNN Forums > Enthusiast Zone > Classic Macs and Mac OS > OS X on a 200 604e PM 8600! WOW!

OS X on a 200 604e PM 8600! WOW!
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dwishbone
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Jul 23, 2002, 09:07 AM
 
I recently got ambitious after working with getting YDL 2.3 on my Powerbase 200 (great OS btw) and thought I would try and put OS X on my PM 8600. Well, what can I say...I am impressed. Although OS X will not win any drag races on this machine, it is far more usable than I expected. It can keep up with my iBook 500 on alot of the basic user interface. It doesn't take very long to open up applications and overall is very responsive. Hell, the thing even looks good with the pitiful 2MB or VRAM that comes in an 8600. I can't wait to pop an upgrade in this thing.
I am still impressed by this machine :-)
24" iMac 2.13ghz C2D | 15" MBP 2ghz CD | "Soundwave" 60GB 5G iPod
     
WizOSX
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Jul 23, 2002, 11:23 AM
 
I have a 7600 in which I replaced the 132mhz 604 with a 200mhz 604e and my reaction is the same--it works surprisingly well. I certainly prefer OS X, even though a bit slow, to OS 9 on the machine. I also have 512mb of cache and 4mb of VRAM, both of which help. Also, 320mb of RAM.

I've done speed tests of typical tasks that I do a lot and it takes just about twice as long for this group of tasks as it does on my Powerbook G4/550 (384mb RAM). Not bad for a 5 year old machine!
     
ebolla
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Jul 23, 2002, 11:28 AM
 
thats sweet
How usable is OSX? and how much ram do you have?
i've got a Voodoo3 card in my 180 604e PM8500 i wonder if that will work with Quartz Extreme?
But first i'm going to try GNU/Darwin
     
WizOSX
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Jul 23, 2002, 12:00 PM
 
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif"> Orginally posted by ebolla
thats sweet
How usable is OSX? and how much ram do you have?
i've got a Voodoo3 card in my 180 604e PM8500 i wonder if that will work with Quartz Extreme?
But first i'm going to try GNU/Darwin
</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">I definitely would not bother with GNU/Darwin. Use Xpostfacto (free download from OWC). It works perfectly as long as you follow the instructions carefully. Just be prepared for a long install--about 2 hours. You will think at some points that it has just hung, but be patient. You will, however, need at least a 3 or 4 gb hard drive. The Voodoo3 card may not work at all. I think you will be using just the built-in video. Check Ryan Rempel's section on the Other World Computing site.
     
dwishbone  (op)
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Jul 23, 2002, 12:24 PM
 
OS X is very useable on my 8600.
I cant wait to get home and tweak it to run better. I'll post again after I can tiker with it a bit.
24" iMac 2.13ghz C2D | 15" MBP 2ghz CD | "Soundwave" 60GB 5G iPod
     
Gene Jockey
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Jul 23, 2002, 06:31 PM
 
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">Originally posted by ebolla:
<strong>thats sweet
How usable is OSX? and how much ram do you have?
i've got a Voodoo3 card in my 180 604e PM8500 i wonder if that will work with Quartz Extreme?
But first i'm going to try GNU/Darwin</strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">If your Voodoo card works at all, it will not use Quartz extreme...

"Requirements:
Quartz Extreme functionality is supported by the following video GPUs: NVIDIA GeForce2 MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 MX, or GeForce4 Ti or any AGP-based ATI RADEON GPU. A minimum of 16MB VRAM is required."

from <a href="http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/quartzextreme.html" target="_blank">Apple</a> .

--Josh
     
PowerPC
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Jul 23, 2002, 07:11 PM
 
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">Originally posted by Gene Jockey:
<strong> </font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">Originally posted by ebolla:
<strong>thats sweet
How usable is OSX? and how much ram do you have?
i've got a Voodoo3 card in my 180 604e PM8500 i wonder if that will work with Quartz Extreme?
But first i'm going to try GNU/Darwin</strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">If your Voodoo card works at all, it will not use Quartz extreme...

"Requirements:
Quartz Extreme functionality is supported by the following video GPUs: NVIDIA GeForce2 MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 MX, or GeForce4 Ti or any AGP-based ATI RADEON GPU. A minimum of 16MB VRAM is required."

from <a href="http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/quartzextreme.html" target="_blank">Apple</a> .

--Josh</strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">The 16MB ATi Rage Ultra in theCRT iMac's is not supported. (in case anyone was wondering)

<small>[ 07-23-2002, 07:11 PM: Message edited by: PowerPC ]</small>
     
himself
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Jul 23, 2002, 07:19 PM
 
I was surprised as well when I installed OSX on my 132MHz 604e 8500... it ran a lot more smoothly than I expected, and it got even better once I upgraded to a 400Mhz G3... plus the total of 394MB ram, 18GB and 2GB HDD's, 4MB vram and a Radeon 7000, and the MacAlly Firewire/USB PCI card, I can see this thing lasting me another two years or so... but it does take forever to boot up
"Bill Gates can't guarantee Windows... how can you guarantee my safety?"
-John Crichton
     
dwishbone  (op)
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Jul 24, 2002, 08:26 AM
 
ok guys and gals,
i went home and tweaked OS X. as you know it is on a 200mhz 604e PM 8600. It has 320MB RAM in it.
I have it upgraded to 10.1.5 now. If you turn off all the goodies OS X is pretty zippy to navigate through.

I applied ShadowKiller to get rid of the OS drop shadows (huge improvement in performance). I recommend using Duality or some other theme switcher and use either GreyAqua or OpAqua. They both have no transparencies and this speeds up navigation greatly. Plus, they look basically like the default Aqua theme. Milk 1.2 is my favorite theme personally. Anywho.
I did the normal tweaking, turning off kext files that i didn't need, turned on window buffering, turned off dock magnigication and app bouncing, deleted localization files, and reniced the finder and window server.
my result?
MacOS X is pretty zippy on a 200 604e.
Its basic navigation is as fast as my 500 iBook.
Applications take about 1 1/2 times to 2 times as long to load. that isn't too bad.
The idle system usage (according to Cee Pee You...great CPU monitor) runs from 8% to 15% with absoluetely nothing happening. my iBook idles at about 3 to 5%.
I can not wait to get my 400mhz G3 upgrade which will tide me over until I can afford the new sweet Sonnet 800 mhz G4 upgrades for this machine.

What is the moral of this story? OSX is a perfectly viable OS on this old hardware. Don't let apple fool you into thinking you have to have a G3. Old machines need love too.
24" iMac 2.13ghz C2D | 15" MBP 2ghz CD | "Soundwave" 60GB 5G iPod
     
CIA
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Jul 24, 2002, 10:40 AM
 
I have a Beige G3 500, and I still think OSX would be slow for me. Maybe I'm just used to high speeds when using a OS....
Work: 2008 8x3.2 MacPro, 8800GT, 16GB ram, zillions of HDs. (video editing)
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dwishbone  (op)
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Jul 24, 2002, 11:15 AM
 
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">Originally posted by CIA:
<strong>I have a Beige G3 500, and I still think OSX would be slow for me. Maybe I'm just used to high speeds when using a OS....</strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">Yes, by default it is...and OS X will probably never be as fast as OS 9 was...not until the G3/G4 chips become much faster. Jaguar is going to be a huge improvement. You can tweak OS X though and speed it up a good 25 to 35% in some cases with lots of little tweaks. Best apps for this
MOX Optimize (turn on window buffering and tweak kext files)
Shadowkiller (turn off drop shadows)
Duality 3 (remove transparencies)
Tinker Tool (just go nuts with configuration)
Transparent Dock (get rid of the dock background)
OS X is a whole different animal with all these tools.
You can use Renicer or an app I wrote called Kram (http://homepage.mac.com/fishtanksoftware) and use it to Renice programs. this speeds them up considerably.
24" iMac 2.13ghz C2D | 15" MBP 2ghz CD | "Soundwave" 60GB 5G iPod
     
benschilke
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Aug 1, 2002, 02:38 PM
 
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">Originally posted by himself:
<strong>I was surprised as well when I installed OSX on my 132MHz 604e 8500... it ran a lot more smoothly than I expected, and it got even better once I upgraded to a 400Mhz G3... plus the total of 394MB ram, 18GB and 2GB HDD's, 4MB vram and a Radeon 7000, and the MacAlly Firewire/USB PCI card, I can see this thing lasting me another two years or so... but it does take forever to boot up
</strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="1" face="Geneva, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif">The sleep mode doesn't work? The convenince of just waking up the computer from sleep rather than starting up is where OS X's stability really makes a difference, I think.
     
himself
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Aug 3, 2002, 02:34 AM
 
Originally posted by benschilke
The sleep mode doesn't work? The convenince of just waking up the computer from sleep rather than starting up is where OS X's stability really makes a difference, I think.
Sleep works fine... but the machine doesn't really "sleep"; the power supply continues to run as loud as ever (sucking up more yet more power), the harddrives don't spin down consistently (they rarely spin down at all) making these already aged HD's more likely to break down if they're running constantly... I don't mind the extended startup times if my components last a bit longer. Besides, I suspect it's the slow startup drive that hinders the boot time more than anything else, so I'll just have to replace that.
     
icruise
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Aug 5, 2002, 02:10 AM
 
Yep, I just installed OS X 10.1.5 on my PM 9600 233mhz with (get this) only 64MB of RAM. I did it more as an experiment than anything else, but I was very surprised at how usable it was. There is a fair amount of disk-thrashing at times due to the lack of memory, but otherwise I think it is better than 10.0 was on my Powerbook G3! I just ordered 256MB more ram, and I imagine that will make it considerably better. Still considering whether a G4 upgrade is worth it...
     
dwishbone  (op)
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Aug 6, 2002, 12:05 PM
 
k...
i have a 400 Mhz 1MB L2 Cache Powerlogix card in my 8600, a 4MB IMS Twin Turbo, and 256MB RAM.
OS X hauls serious bootay.
I cant wait until I can afford the G4 800 and a Radeon 7000 and put in this bad boy.
     
Spaldings
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Aug 7, 2002, 10:36 PM
 
I too have an 8600 (mine with a 450 G3 XLR8 card and ati nexus vid). It's worked well for me for the past what must be 5 and a half years now. As much as I would love to dump more RAM into it, I could really use an increase in bus speed, cpu power, you know the works. I am looking forward - hopefully very shortly- to when I have both this box and the top-end DP coming next to it. It's just something about the hopeful speed shock.

But congrats to all to get X to run well on their old machines.
     
DominikHoffmann
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Aug 26, 2002, 04:01 PM
 
I have a 7500 with a PowerLogix G3/400 card in it. It has 256 MB of RAM, and two hard drives totaling 6 GB (2 GB at ID 0 and 4 GB at ID 2). I have Mac OS X run off the 2 GB hard drive. The 4 GB drive has a 300 MB partition for OS 9.1, so that I can boot into that.

After installing the devtools I copied /Developer to the 4 GB hard drive via the Finder and replaced /Developer with a symbolic link to the 4 GB drive. That way I conserve space on the 2 GB drive. To prove that this worked, I installed fink from source and finally moved /sw in the same manner.

Dominik Hoffmann
     
DrBoar
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Aug 27, 2002, 01:41 PM
 
I have OS X in a 7500/200 604E 512 k L2 and 264 MB RAM it works nice but slow. Would a ATI 128 card bost the OS X performance?

Previously a V3 200o card doubled the 2D performance in OS 9 but that card has been removed.

Would I gain any 2D performance in OS X with that card compared to the motherboard or is it CPU bound?
     
DrBoar
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Aug 27, 2002, 01:50 PM
 
I have OS X in a 7500/200 604E 512 k L2 and 264 MB RAM it works nice but slow. Would a ATI 128 card bost the OS X performance?

Previously a V3 200o card doubled the 2D performance in OS 9 but that card has been removed.

Would I gain any 2D performance in OS X with that card compared to the motherboard or is it CPU bound?
     
   
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