speeding up a sluggish g4

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Soldato
Joined
21 Nov 2004
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13,557
Location
Wishaw
right guys, as some of you know my power PC project went up in smoke(literally ) and is on the back burner for a few weeks till i obtain some shiny new parts.


so i've cobbled together a G4 MDD for daily duties in the meantime but its sluggish. lots of beachballs and video in youtube is choppy as anything


what i need to know is whats needing some attention

spec

Dual 867mhz power pc cpus
Ati rage pro gpu (16meg fail)
1 gig ram(another gig going in next week when it arrives)
and a cheap POS maxtor 60gig HDD
osx 10.5.8


i did a cleaninstall of osx when i put this together(yesterday) and its feels slower than it should be i'm pointing the finger at the gpu just now so a couple of questions


whats the most powerful AGP card i can sling into my g4?

can i add a sata pci card and install an ssd bootdisk?

is there anyway to bypass the 2 gig ram limit imposed on this system?
 
Is it really worth putting in a SSD?

Is the current HDD 5400 or 7200?

I'm not sure you're going to see any 'performance' increase to be honest. Usually 10.4 is just about all it can handle so the system is probably struggling to run 10.5.8?
 
have been looking into the possibility of overclocking but its a seriously dark art on macs,

overclocking an mdd involves desoldering resistors and a lot of faffing about :(


might have to look into uprated logic boards and gpus :) :) :)

wonder if anyone has watercooled a g4?
 
i dunno tbh i've been using it quite happily for most of the day now :)

once i drop another gig of ram in and get a beefier gpu i think it will be spot on for general usage
 
bit of an update on the project G4, just won a radeon 9000 on the bay :) 64meg version.

also have 2gig of ram arriving next week from the MM. its all starting to take shape now.


just need to break my soldering iron out for some overclocking action
 
Maybe you could take some pictures and do a bit of a build log?

Personally I wouldn't have bothered with something so obsolete but that's just my opinion. It would be interesting to see how much you've spent on it and what it is capable of when you've finished.
 
PardonTheWait said:
It's way past the point where you can do anything to make that machine useful as a desktop machine. Dont waste your money!
Click to expand...

I disagree. It's way past the point where you can do anything to make that machine useful as a desktop machine running OSX granted. Stick a Linux installation on it, using a lightweight window manager. The only problem that you'll really run into there is no official Linux PPC Flash Player, and the open source ones REALLY thrash the CPU. If you can live without flash, there's really no reason to ditch that hardware yet.

edit - For reference, I run Debian on my aging G4 Macbook with no issues. It's much snappier than OSX ever was. Getting it running on a Macbook is quite tricky, but on a desktop you shouldn't really have any problems.
 
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thats half the fun :) making something that is in effect junk ( i got 5 mac g4's for under £20 i found a gig of ram in a drawer stole a dvd writer out one of the other g4's and i've spent £16 on a new gpu


now i just need to find a dirt cheap sonnet dual 1.8ghz upgrade board and a couple of sheap sata drives and pci card and i'm rocking a tasty rig :)


i'll put some pics up shortly if theres interest
 
I nearly suggested putting Debian on it myself. For what it's worth I don't think OSX 10.5 will be doing it any favours, as I noticed a difference (for the worse) when I installed it on my G4 iBook compared to Tiger. Everything seemed a little sluggish and it didn't handle some of the animations very well.
 
well i've got the ram and gpu sorted and i'm about to install a raid card to try and speed up the hdd side of things :)

now if only i could find a sonnet dual 1.8ghz upgrade i'd be rocking a half decent rig
 
Apopcalyptic said:
The only problem that you'll really run into there is no official Linux PPC Flash Player, and the open source ones REALLY thrash the CPU. If you can live without flash, there's really no reason to ditch that hardware yet.
Click to expand...

To be fair that's quite a large stumbling block these days for a desktop machine.

But maybe I should have said to make it more useful than it is - I just don't think spending money on it has any real point.
 
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