How Fast is Apple OS X Leopard On Old Macs?

[jonny]

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/apple/how-fas...315288.php

I'd like to know if anyone is liking it on a G5 iMac. Faster than 10.4?

-Jonny

[jdc]

with only 768 ram, not surprising

[incognegro]

OK, compare the startup and shutdown of a PC laptop with Windows Vista Pro installed, and make sure it's at the bottom end of the minimum requirements. Compare with the speeds listed at that link for a 1 GHz Powerbook G4 using 768 MB of RAM.

Heck, I'll even grant the PC the "advantage" of 2.0 GHz, with 1 GB of RAM.

Let's get the stopwatches out!

[Harbourmaster]

From the screenshot that is posted it appears that spotlight is busy indexing the drive. Until that is done of course it's going to seem sluggish!!!

[timg]

So has anyone here installed it on an older G4 system?

I'm thinking it's probably not worth the money to upgrade.

[MacArtist]

Considering Tiger ran kind of pokey on G3s; Leopard is running the same with G4s?

I wish Apple would make it easy to install a scaled down Leopard. No coverflow but have the benefits of improved finder, etc.

[Numo]

FWIW, from AppleInsider:

"In my testing of Leopard on both a 2005 1.25 GHz G4 PowerBook with 1 GB RAM, and a more modern, year old Core Duo MacBook Pro with 3 GB of RAM installed, I found the system's general performance to be excellent on both machines. The general interface speed of Leopard, despite its fancier bells and whistles, is at least slightly faster overall than Tiger in general and in some cases dramatically snappier and more responsive, even while offering more both in features and in flourish.

That's largely because many of the fancy features of Leopard are delegated to the video card, which is usually sitting idle. If your system lacks the hardware required for certain effects, Leopard doesn't struggle to do them anyway, it often just trims things down to do what it can. Of course, Leopard doesn't magically speed up your slow hard drive or double your installed RAM, but it does take full advantage of your system's resources. At the same time, Leopard can still run on machines that are now a half decade old."

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/...sktop.html

[Bernie]

Quicksilver 2002 here. But it is a dulie. Half a decade is not that long, is it?

[OWC Larry]

With the right upgrade... really good.

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/

from there:
Notes/Tip for PPC Mac performance in Leopard - A reply to an earlier post on 10.5 performance issues from a G5 tower owner:

" Retail 10.5 is a lot faster than the betas btw. You were right about the debug (code) slowing it down a lot on ppc machine... (regarding our previous conversation on the beta-Mike)
I too can confirm the bug with endless bouncing apps and jerky operation of system. I tracked this issue to AFP and not coverflow or graphics. This seems to happen on ppc machine if you are still connected to another mac over AFP. Unmount any network connections when not in use avoids this issue for me.
Also on same issue I have found software update will appear to hang if connected to a network as well using admin account. As soon as you disconnect from any AFP connections software update immediately regains responsiveness and shows usual administrative password request. I suspect a bug in AFS somehow caused the pw request to be supressed until AFS was complete.
Just things to look into for that user experiencing issues. 10.5 makes integration with other macs and network volumes so seamless you may not even notice you're connected. Pay attention to volumes with eject buttons in the finder side bar.

(I asked Adam for details on his PPC Mac (as I think he has a 7448 CPU Upgraded G4 Tower IIRC).-Mike)
My ppc mac is an (originally) 733MHz Digital Audio Tower with Newertech 7448 2GHz single processor upgrade. Sonnet branded sata card with two western digital 10k rpm raptor drives. Ati 9800 pro rohs card. And some walmart no name brand usb2.0 card. Performance is fantastic. I think the ati 9800 helps a lot since it supports core image that probably makes a big diff with coverflow and all those features lagging other ppc users.
BTW with the sata card STILL no detection of hard drives what so ever in system profiler. Oh well.
-Adam "

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[timg]

"I think the ati 9800 helps a lot since it supports core image that probably makes a big diff with coverflow and all those features lagging other ppc users."

I think this would be my problem. I have a GigE machine (upgraded to dual 7457's @ 1.32Ghz), but no core image graphics card (it's a Geforce 4Ti).