[shifuimam]

So we all know about my hacked up tangerine clamshell.

It's got the last-rev logic board in it (466MHz FireWire), and I recently added a 512MB PC100 RAM module to supplement the 64MB onboard (I previously had 256MB installed)

For all of one day (before I took it apart, forgetting that the logic board I was installing was bad), I had a 500MHz 12" first-rev white iBook, with very similar specs - 500MHz processor, 512MB PC133 RAM, and 64MB onboard. I noticed that this iBook was really quite peppy with 10.3.9 installed...surprisingly fast, in fact.

I was expecting a much bigger performance boost on the clamshell with this RAM upgrade, especially with stuff like Photoshop and Firefox than what's happened (which doesn't seem to be a whole lot over the 256MB module previously installed, to be honest). I pretty much expected it to show similar speed to the 500MHz iBook I was messing around with.

EveryMac.com suggests that the 466MHz clamshell and the 500MHz white iBook have the same line of processor in them - would the 34MHz boost be that big of a difference? I haven't run memtest on the DIMM in my clamshell yet, but my only guess at this point is that there's something janky with the RAM.

Anyone have any ideas...?

[gooser]

a couple of years ago i doubled my ram on my imac g4 (256 to 512) and i noticed no change in performance. go figure. maybe we bought our ram from the same place.

[mduell]

Bad RAM wouldn't cause poor performance, it would cause crashes/freezes/etc. 576MB memory isn't all that much, so I'd guess you're off in swap la-la land and you have an older and/or almost full hard drive, compared to the IceBook with a newer and/or less full hard drive.

[ixus_123]

You could try reducing the display colours from millions to thousands to speed things up and a less memory hungry browser like Opera perhaps.

Maybe the disk is slow on the clamshell - not to mention bus speeds.

I have one too (366Mhz) that was chuging along quite happily for a couple of years as a web server (running Ubuntu Linux) with 320mb ram

[shifuimam]

Well, it's got a 5200RPM 80GB drive, so I don't think that disk space is an issue.

Apparently there's no way to limit the swap file/virtual memory size in OS X, which is a major downer. I've got a 5.25" FireWire enclosure handy, and I'm going to try installing FC8 on this thing to see how that handles.

The RAM isn't much by today's standards, but again - 576MB in a 500MHz iBook G3 made it really very usable. The same RAM in this 466MHz G3 doesn't seem to be making that big of a difference. Conversation beachballs a lot, too. I've got like five or six apps running in the background (wClock, Hey Folders!, DragThing, etc), but I wouldn't think that would kill the speed *that* much...

P.S. Sorry for the bump. I forgot about this thread for a few days after vacation.

[Big Mac]

RAM only helps speed when you had too little of it before. And expecting an appreciable speed increase out of an 8 year-old Mac is unrealistic.

[shifuimam]

That still doesn't answer one of my original questions...

I used another iBook G3 with a slightly faster processor and the exact same RAM specs. It ran noticeably faster than this clamshell with the same RAM specs (both running 10.3.9). According to Mactracker and EveryMac.com, the 500MHz IceBook and the 466MHz clamshell have the same processor, just different speeds. Both have a 66MHz FSB.

I'm curious to know why I'm not seeing a speed improvement (any speed improvement at all - I am not technologically naive enough to expect a 466MHz G3 to behave like even a G4; I just expected it to behave a little more like the 500MHz G3 with nearly identical specs) from the RAM upgrade.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by shifuimam 

Well, it's got a 5200RPM 80GB drive, so I don't think that disk space is an issue.

But how much space is free and what's the page in count after a couple days?

As a nitpick, it's a 5400RPM hard drive not 5200RPM.

[ntsc]

These are completely different product revisions you're talking about, the motherboard in the iceBook is completely different from that in the clamshell. Although the speeds the boards are clocking are the same I'd be surprised if Apple hadn't made some decent architectural alterations which improved performance.

You might want to have a look at your pageouts to disk, if you aren't getting many (say in the 10s of 1000s) then your pretty much at the optimal RAM config. and its really the rest of the system that is causing the issue. As far as responsiveness goes, although the iceBook's video card isn't QuartzExtreme-able you might find it has more VRAM, and despite neither system having steller graphics the OS does use the card for certain operations. Which might be something to consider.

[Koralatov]

The only thing I can see that's different is that the iceBook has a 500MHz cache speed vs. the Clamshell's 466MHz, and the iceBook uses PC100, whereas the Clamshell uses PC66. Both of these could be a factor in it, though I don't imagine it would make a huge difference; I suspect it would be quite subtle at best.

I have 576MB in my Clamshell, running Tiger 10.4.11 on the stock 10GB drive, and I really don't think it's that bad at all. I occasionally get the beachball when I'm running more than a couple of programs at once, though nothing major. It judders when I'm watching Flash video in Safari, but that's to be expected on a G3.

I suspect your major issue is that the bus is saturated, and no amount of extra RAM will compensate for that sadly.

[finboy]

Originally Posted by shifuimam 

Anyone have any ideas...?

You could turn off the swapfile option. Oh wait, in OS X you can't. Nevermind.