OSX speed on 604e?

Ripcord

Ripcord

Senior Lurker
Has anyone been able to install OS X on a 604e-based PPC (presumedly with R. Rempel's UtilityX)? If so, what have your experiences been with speed?

I'm brand new to the Mac world and just bought a PowerMac 7300/180 (8 gig, 256MB RAM), and I'd really like to install OS X on it (after trying out 9.1 and 8.6 for a while), but I'm wondering how bad performance will be (beyond the normal 10.0.4 problems). Is Classic unbearably slow? Is a G3 upgrade card required to make it bearable, or will I be okay?

Thanks
Ian
 
Thanks for joining the Mac community! Hope you find it to be as welcoming and pleasant as I have :)

As far as installing OS X on a 604e, its possible, but on your machine, I wouldn't recommend it. I had X installed on an 8600/300 w/ 256MB of RAM, and it was, shall we say, SLOW. It was usuable to a point, but not for much of anything requiring real productivity. Even surfing the web became an exercise after a while and I found myself booting back into 9.1 rather than wait almost 30 sec. to a minute just to launch IE 5.1 or OmniWeb. But it was cool nonetheless!

I hear that 10.1 doesn't run on Old World models at all – now, I'm sure that will be fixed by Ryan Rempel, my personal hero for bringing X to the old skool macs, but until it does, I'd say wait. 10.0.4 just isn't going to perform well enough to make it interesting, and it may even make you VERY frustrated. But once they get 10.1 working, I'll bet my two eyed teeth that while it probably won't be as snappy as my B&W G3 350 (itself an aging computer at this point), it'll be plenty useful and worthwhile.

just my 2¢
thedbp
 
how is the performance on 3rd party G3 or G4 upgrade cards for the 7500-9600 machines? Obviously memory, and hard drive access times also makes a big difference in performance.

Just curious if anyone has the same performance issues with an upgraded 604.
 
I have a PM8500 with an XLR 450 G4 Carrier card. OS X works great with this set up. It worked ok with my G3 300 card but now with the G4 card everything is much faster. I also added an Atto U2 SCSI card and a faster drive and 258 megs of RAM. The biggest limitation is that so far no one has been able to get video cards to work with this set up.
 
Call me stupid, but when I was overclocking my Beige G3 266, I accidently down-clocked it to 160mhz. I had timed every application opening and the boot speed, etc previously to the underclock, because I planned to do some benchmarking.

It started booting up at 160mhz, and I was thinking "Man, this seams a bit slower..."

But it was tollerable. And it ran smoothly. However, its still a G3....

Let us know how your adventures into the (perfect) world of Apple Macintosh computers goes!

OOPS, meant to add some more to my message:

I strongly recomend giving Yellow Dog Linux a try on the mac. I had it on my 266, and it ran increadably faster than Mac OS X did. Don't expect perfect USB support or additional network interfaces without a kernel recompile, but its a great os. And the ydl email list is a great source if you have any questions.

http://www.yellowdoglinux.com
http://lists.yellowdoglinux.com
 
Hyo all

I have an iMac rev a (G3/233) with 256 Mb RAM. 9.1 works great and nice and fast (well, nothing compared to the G4 but still, I'm sentimental and I don't want to throw my iMac away :) ). But how will 10.1 work? Will it work "just" as fast, faster or slower?

Replies are always appreciated :D

Ciao
.anerki
 
I'm going to try 10.1 on a 120mhz 604, the slowest CPU which will run OS X.

I would have had it working before but it didn't see my mouse. This time I'll be using the numeric keypad mouse emulation.

Without the mouse I did manage to display a sheet and put it away, and that was snappy |-)

Unsupported Utility X 1.1 works BTW.
 
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