On Jul 29, 2012, at 8:45 AM, Beniamino Cenci Goga wrote:
My 1996 PowerMac 7600 with a G4 Sonnet 1000 MHz, IDE HD connected to internal IDE card and plenty of RAM screams with OS 9, but when I boot off OS X it can barely keep the pace of a modest Wallstreet 233MHz.
This isn't correct. I own a 7600 with a 450 MHz G4 and it handles OS X 10.4.11 a LOT better than a 233 MHz Wallstreet. It can play most internet steaming video smoothly, and can "almost" play 1080p HD video.
AFAIK there's no such thing as a 1 GHz G4 for any PCI PowerMac, the fastest possible would be 600 MHz because of the 50 MHz system bus and the 12x multiplier limitation (50 MHz x12 = 600 MHz). I don't believe any 600 MHz G4 was ever manufactured for the PCI Macs, so the limit would probably be 500 MHz unless you have one of the ZIF PCI cards that will accept a rare 600 MHz ZIF CPU.
The key to running OS X on old-world Macs is a fast video card and max RAM. I use flashed PC VisionTek Xtasy Radeon 9100 64MB with the modified Mac Radeon 8500 ROM. There are some better cards, I believe the Radeon 9800 PCI might be best, or perhaps the nVidia GeForce FX6200 256MB? The 7600 max's out at 1 GB RAM (8x128MB). It also helps to have OS X on a RAID 0 striped pair.
A 233 MHz Wallstreet is useless for OS X. A max'd out 7600 is possibly useful still, but the cost of making it useful is past the sweet spot and makes no sense economically.
-- 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
