thanks to tim and bruce and dan for the helpful replies.
You may very well be better of purchasing an older G4 that will run OS X natively than pushing you resent box. Especially with the prices of the G4's down as low as they are now. Better ram and faster bus speeds would be a plus.yes, i've thought of that, especially since the application i'm talking about is macspartan (ab initio molecular modeling, if that means anything to the list), and a single command can easily require 72 hrs of CPU time to execute with this set-up. i could readily give it a problem that would take a year to execute, if i tried. so . . . . the faster RAM and bus should help as much as the faster CPU speed. but if i do buy a new box, i'm tempted not bother with a minor upgrade, but go the whole 9 yards. and that is not quite so inexpensive. i'm just a poor underpaid professor, and the software upgrade is going to set me back $750 to begin with.
but a big issue may be your ram. OS X is very picky about the quality/speed of your ram that may be acting just fine in OS 9.duh! sorry i left out the RAM specs. the original RAM has been pulled and replaced with 256K of dimms i bought from joseph bettencourt (some list members may know of him). i'm pretty sure the RAM won't be an issue. they are 64meg, 6ns, 2k refresh. i think they are top shelf. i had a thorough email correspondence with him about the importance of the refresh rate, and i was impressed with his knowldedge of the subject. unless someone has personally experienced a conflict with RAM from joseph bettencourt, i'm not going to worry about it.
this is a little off the topic, but at the time SCSI-160 interface was introduced, very few drives had internal transfer rates above 10MB/sec (as you know, that's why they had RAIDS). i bought that SCSI controller back in the day, because it was needed to run the drive, which was one of the few with an internal transfer rate above 10MB/sec and 8MB of onboard buffer cache. i don't need loads of disk space. speed is more important to me.This is likely a problem. The Apple OEM TT cards do not work with OS X. That card may or may not work.the video card is the original IX Micro Twin Turbo 128 (8MB VRAM).
I agree entirely with Tim, look for a newer machine supporting OS X first. Your experience will be a lot better, especially if it's a '..being forced to upgrade..' situation.
The drive bus isn't as fast as that SCSI card, but that could be transferred to the B&W if you really wanted, but large ATA drives are so ridiculously cheaper, and a ATA-133 card isn't going to be a lot slower than that SCSI, particularly since the REST of the system is going to be considerably faster.
There's a Supermac LEM list that I belong to which you can subscribe to as you did to this list. Very knowledgable people and a good many of us are running 10.3.6 on them with great success.
Tim is right about the quality of RAM and also a lot of us on the list (was close to 500 subscribers) maxed out the RAM to 1024 megs, it was cheap but care had to be taken to make sure it was all good. The type of cards and everything else can be gotten out of the lists archives. The TT video card will probably work but upgrading to a faster card will help. The two important things are; that a lot of RAM is everything and that the "slow" built in SCSI may not be seen in OSX. I would go into more details but this is the wrong list. Repost your question to the supermac list and you will get help.
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ok, well actually i did subscribe to both lists at the same time, but i thought this one sounded like the better the one to post to first. i'll try the crosslist repost then.
john
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