Minimum G4 to run OS X well?

hazmat

hazmat

Rusher of Din
So it has come to this. I love running my Mac at home so much that there is no other OS I like. Since all we can get at work are Dells, I am seriously considering getting a cheap used G4 for work, which I can run with a KVM switch along with my PC. So with plenty of RAM, what is the slowest G4 you guys think will run OS X well? I don't plan on doing a lot of video type stuff at work, just my normal UNIX sysadmin, web browsing, etc. So I would have a bunch of terminal windows open and a web browser and whatever else. Light usage.

Thanks.
 
OS-X is running ok on my 400 MHz G3 (it was also ok when it was only 300 MHz), so any G4 will do.

The only app that sometimes lags is iPhoto.

And off course it is faster on my 1 GHz G4. But the 300 MHz G3 was ok too.
 
Cool, then. I should be able to get a G4 400 or even 500 fairly cheap now. I don't need a mouse or monitor either.
 
You could also consider replacing your current desktop with a laptop.
If you go for a 400-500 MHz G4, be sure to getg a lot of RAM and a graphics card that supports Quartz Extreme. It's a completely different world ;)
 
yeah any G4 should be fine, and give it the extra ram, osx definately runs smoother with the extra memory. My brother just put osx on a G3 400Mhz iMac and it runs great with the 512 mb of ram.
 
I have a 600mhz g3 with 256 mb of ram and osx is snappy. It might just be that I've never really had a fast computer, but it runs as fast as windows xp does on 1.8 inch dells at school. I dunno, I never notice much slowdown with safari/finder/terminal. It's just great!
 
For two months I bitched to my boss about switching over to the mac, he said there is no good reason to. So, last week he purchased 5 Dell 450 workstations for our design shop. We'll as of this week 3 of the 5 don't work. 2 have bad motherboards the other a bad memory module so, it doesn't even turn on. The best part about this is that my boss has spent a total of 9 hours on the phone with Dell support this week... talk about a productive week.

I actually thought he was going to have an anyurism today... Today was the first day that that Dell tech guy could look at the computer that went down on Saturday 48 hours (in house pretty cool) but the other two computers that went bad he wasn't allowed to touch/fix since they broke down on monday and tuesday respectively so we have another guy coming on Thursday to look at those. Even though most of our guys spend at least 8 hours everyday basically playing around with some pretty fast Xeon processor machines with XPpro loaded with ever imaginable image manipulation software product out there, they all have macs at home and some of their best work they do after hours.
 
I ran 10.1.3 on a B&W G3 350 (704mb ram) without issues. I upgraded the processor to a powerlogix g4 450 and saw a small improvement in speed (I use photoshop and bbedit mostly).
It is now running 10.1.5 just fine.

Its not as fast as my QS DP 1GHZ, but it is still very usable and will be for the next few years.


BTW: I have a spare Wallstreet 266 at work that has 10.2 loaded on it (with 64mb RAM :eek: :eek: :confused: ). It takes forever to start, but it IS usable for surfing. But, it needs more RAM in a bad way.

Matter of fact, I have 6 "spare" Wallstreet 266's and a "spare" PB 3400 that noone is using -- my boss is a M$ devotee and will only buy, support, use dell's or gateways. I am the exception, I get Macs. I told my boss that if he took away my Mac, then I would quit.
 
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