On Dec 7, 3:49 pm, Kris Tilford <ktilfo...@cox.net> wrote: > On Dec 7, 2009, at 2:02 PM, Stewie de Young wrote: > > On one of the LEM articles someone put Tiger and Leopard on the same > > G4 Powerbook ( 1.4Ghz from memory ) and using benchmarking tests > > found that Leopard slowed it down by only 4% - hardly noticeable in > > my opinion. > > That would be this article: > <http://lowendmac.com/ed/royal/09sr/leopard-vs-tiger.html>
wherein Simon ran a basic benchmark on stock Tiger and Leopard on a 867-MHz PB. > I don't agree with this article. My experience is that the hit on > performance is closer to the 15-20% range for any PPC Mac running > Leopard as compared to the faster Tiger. I believe my estimate is born > out by the archived results on both xBench & Geekbench. And I don't agree too, but in the other direction. The benchmarks are correct - Leopard *with* all it's extra services running is a bit slower than Tiger. Depending on where it is in the cycles (Spotlight indexing, creating coverflow previews, etc), it's anywhere from a few percent slower to perhaps 20%. Of course, you can say the same thing *stock* Tiger vs Panther, with its services. But hey - We Are Robin Hood^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H LEM! We slap advanced stuff on older hardware then "tune" it a bit. Turn off or de-prioritize the features that are pigging you down. The benchmarks one of my clients ran, using Power Mac G4s and Mac Pros, showed that Leopard's kernel and frameworks were 5 to 10% *faster* than Tiger's. It wasn't until they turned on the other services that things slowed. Even the fastest car slows down when the dog has its head out the window. >it should be noted that Intel Macs are the opposite, they are faster >for Leopard and slower for Tiger. That's because Tiger's x86 support was a slap-on kludgy mess. When you turn off the extra services, so as to compare kernel to kernel, the difference is narrowed quite a bit. > > I put a new 7200RPM drive in my Pismo and at a rough guess I would > > say it made it 10-15% faster. Yea, as you would expect, accepting the extra power usage. > EXACTLY! And this is the problem with the article you cited above. The > comparison was done on the same Mac, BUT, the problem is that only one > HD was used, and it was a triple booting (three partitions) of one > single HD. The difference between partitions on one HD can be in the > 10-15% or greater range, so if the Leopard OS was on a fast partition > and the Tiger on a slow partition, the results would be skewed. Sorry, I don't buy that. Given basic head motion and read optimizations etc... Unless something is badly screwed up, the access difference between two partitions should be less than 1%. Even less so when the other partition is idle and the HD isn't cycled (head parked, spun down, spun up, ...). Bottom line, IMO: Leopard runs quite well on a 17" 1.33GHz Powerbook G4 (the original subject of this thread). And since newer software will require Leopard - it's just not worth the time/effort of doing Tiger. - Dan. -- - Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth. -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
