Tweaking Hardware for Speed - Help....

riven2000

Registered
I recently downloaded the new demo for Myst V and found my system lacking in speed. Basically I want to tweak my hardware to optimize everything (already tweaked OS X), and am wondering what anyone else has to say on this. My system is:

Gigabit Ethernet G4
Mercury Extreme 1.5Ghz CPU (Excellent btw)
1GB RAM
60GB Hard Drive
40GB Hard Drive
Radeon 8500 Mac Edition
OS 10.3.9

I talked with ATI tech support, and they suggested that with my 200-Watt stock power source, I might need to take out the second hard drive, TV card, etc. They also suggested taking out some of the RAM (I was thinking of deinterleaving it too). I can't afford a better power source just yet, so I have to optimize what I have. Any thoughts anyone? :)
 
If you have, let's say a Powermac Mirrored Drive Doors or any PM with both ATA 66 and ATA 100 cables ready, put one of the HDs on the ATA/100 and the other on the ATA/66. This should increase performance a bit.
 
Why would that increase performance? There is no performance drop in using two drives in a master-slave combo, unless you're accessing both hard drives heavily and simultaneously, and even then you'd need benchmarking software to perceive any difference.

I have a 1st-generation G4 machine with 3 7200RPM hard drives, two video cards, two monitors (one being driven off of the computer's internal power supply), boatloads of external USB devices and an upgraded DVD drive, and it runs games like Quake III and the like just fine... my point is that I hardly think that lack of power from the power supply is the problem.

Does Myst allow you to tweak the graphics settings? My guess is that you're overloading that 8500 card by maxing out the video options in Myst... plus, your computer has a 100MHz bus speed, which is slow by today's standards -- that could be the bottleneck.
 
It's slow even with minimum settings. I asked ATI if it was possible to force the in-game color depth to 16-bit to see if that would help, but he said that was controlled by the game. :rolleyes:
 
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