Leopard Slow issue on G4

[vailancer]

Hi, i need some idea why my new upgraded G4 quicksilver 2001 runs pretty slow on 10.5.4 with 733mhz cpu + 1.5GB Ram + 6800GT 256MB DDR3???

i check the activity monitor, SystemUIServer, WindowServer has 15-25% Load each.. Spaces, Dock and webpage scroll on Safari lags too. What should i do? Hope someone can give me some guidance thanks!

[dillon31292]

You barely meeting the minimum specs does not mean Leopard should run fast, just good enough. Now you see why idiots {censored} about Vista.

[iNoob]

Hi, i need some idea why my new upgraded G4 quicksilver 2001 runs pretty slow on 10.5.4 with 733mhz cpu + 1.5GB Ram + 6800GT 256MB DDR3???

i check the activity monitor, SystemUIServer, WindowServer has 15-25% Load each.. Spaces, Dock and webpage scroll on Safari lags too. What should i do? Hope someone can give me some guidance thanks!

I think you're supposed to get at least a >867 MHz G4 to run Leopard. Maybe that's the reason Apple doesn't want it to run on G3s.

[vailancer]

meaning once my processor hit 867mhz leopard will run smooth?how bout overclock it? im just wondering why a good vga card still slow. maybe its cpu dependent?

[dillon31292]

meaning once my processor hit 867mhz leopard will run smooth?how bout overclock it? im just wondering why a good vga card still slow. maybe its cpu dependent?

Not neccessarily. Meeting minimum specs does not mean it will "smooth". 131MHz is hardly enough to make any kind of difference. Honestly, how the hell do people get "smooth" out of "minimum"?

[vailancer]

OWC has a 1.2ghz processor with L3 cache and 100% compatible to leopard. any users here can give some opinion or feedback?

[SticMAC™]

I run a 1,25Ghz with 512MB RAM and it is good for normal stuff. My friend borrowed me 2 x1GB pc3200 modules for a day and it went flying! I could open Fireworks, Word, Entourage, Vuze and Itunes while surfing Firefox and it had minimal to no lagging

 

Checkout the Bay's auctions before you buy something new!

StiCMAN

OWC has a 1.2ghz processor with L3 cache and 100% compatible to leopard. any users here can give some opinion or feedback?

[vailancer]

ohh pc3200 looks like yours is a MDD? 1.25Ghz processor from OWC or newer tech? is the cpu process high when you open firefox+itunes+msn messenger? Not to say when playing wow i just get 10fps and worst 2fps.

[Synaesthesia]

WOW is slow because your CPU can't handle it, but I'm surprised that you experience general slowness, with 1.5GB RAM, you should be fine. Did you upgrade to Leopard or perform a clean install? I find a clean install helps sometimes.

 

My experience: Leopard is laggy+slow on a Powerbook G4 1.33ghz with 512mb RAM, but fast and responsive on an iBook G4 1.33ghz with 1.5gb RAM.

[vailancer]

i did the clean install.. but i still cant understand why it slow on dock, spaces ..etc since my gpu was a 6800GT 256MB 256BIT

somemore its 1.5GB ram.

[vailancer]

Results 29.57

System Info

Xbench Version 1.3

System Version 10.5.4 (9E17)

Physical RAM 1536 MB

Model PowerMac3,5

Processor PowerPC G4 @ 734 MHz

Version 7450 (V'ger) v2.1

L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)

L2 Cache 256K @ 734 MHz

Bus Frequency 134 MHz

Video Card GeForce 6800 GT

Drive Type IBM-DTLA-307030 IBM-DTLA-307030

CPU Test 35.93

GCD Loop 59.06 3.11 Mops/sec

Floating Point Basic 23.10 548.90 Mflop/sec

AltiVec Basic 94.66 3.77 Gflop/sec

vecLib FFT 42.70 1.41 Gflop/sec

Floating Point Library 22.25 3.87 Mops/sec

Thread Test 26.24

Computation 30.74 622.68 Kops/sec, 4 threads

Lock Contention 22.88 984.51 Klocks/sec, 4 threads

Memory Test 25.55

System 21.65

Allocate 129.40 475.19 Kalloc/sec

Fill 15.79 767.88 MB/sec

Copy 14.82 306.03 MB/sec

Stream 31.15

Copy 32.45 670.14 MB/sec [altivec]

Scale 32.74 676.35 MB/sec [altivec]

Add 30.51 649.98 MB/sec [altivec]

Triad 29.17 623.99 MB/sec [altivec]

Quartz Graphics Test 34.80

Line 30.22 2.01 Klines/sec [50% alpha]

Rectangle 38.42 11.47 Krects/sec [50% alpha]

Circle 35.76 2.92 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]

Bezier 36.93 931.45 beziers/sec [50% alpha]

Text 33.85 2.12 Kchars/sec

OpenGL Graphics Test 34.23

Spinning Squares 34.23 43.42 frames/sec

User Interface Test 8.01

Elements 8.01 36.74 refresh/sec

Disk Test 24.81

Sequential 29.76

Uncached Write 22.82 14.01 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 22.80 12.90 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 55.01 16.10 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 35.03 17.61 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Random 21.27

Uncached Write 7.78 0.82 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 32.37 10.36 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 76.37 0.54 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 64.30 11.93 MB/sec [256K blocks]

 

 

This is my xbench result.. please comment thank you!

[the_gael]

vailancer - that is pretty much the score I got on xbench with my G4 Dual 800mhz Quicksilver with 1.5gb RAM.

[vailancer]

installed tiger and some improvement on the speed. guess its the processor not fast enough.

[DukeRaoul]

RE: XBench results

 

Look at those Hard Drive speeds - there's a major bottleneck. Are you running the original Apple-installed HDD? If so, you can boost the speed of everything by installing a faster drive. Look at prices for Seagate Barracuda drives on Newegg. You can get a 7200 RPM IDE hard drive and boost the loading speeds of everything that loads from the hard drive.

Your highest read/write speed was something like 15 MB/s there right? I have a USB Flash drive that can write data that fast, and reads at 30 MB/s.

My Seagate Barracuda SATA drive (7200 RPM) scores both read and write speeds around 60 MB/s in XBench 1.3 on Leopard. The IDE version is probably a little bit slower, but would be a major improvement.

Back a couple of years ago, when I was playing Doom 3 on my Digital Audio G4 powermac (1.4GHz OWC upgrade), I noticed the bottleneck in the hard drive, and I found a PCI RAID card on eBay and bought it. I made a RAID 0 array of 2 of those IDE 7200 RPM Barracuda's, and got XBench read/write scores around 100 MB/s.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822148236

$40 for a 80GB Barracuda drive (the cheapest one)

[vailancer]

RE: XBench results

 

Look at those Hard Drive speeds - there's a major bottleneck. Are you running the original Apple-installed HDD? If so, you can boost the speed of everything by installing a faster drive. Look at prices for Seagate Barracuda drives on Newegg. You can get a 7200 RPM IDE hard drive and boost the loading speeds of everything that loads from the hard drive.

Your highest read/write speed was something like 15 MB/s there right? I have a USB Flash drive that can write data that fast, and reads at 30 MB/s.

My Seagate Barracuda SATA drive (7200 RPM) scores both read and write speeds around 60 MB/s in XBench 1.3 on Leopard. The IDE version is probably a little bit slower, but would be a major improvement.

Back a couple of years ago, when I was playing Doom 3 on my Digital Audio G4 powermac (1.4GHz OWC upgrade), I noticed the bottleneck in the hard drive, and I found a PCI RAID card on eBay and bought it. I made a RAID 0 array of 2 of those IDE 7200 RPM Barracuda's, and got XBench read/write scores around 100 MB/s.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822148236

$40 for a 80GB Barracuda drive (the cheapest one)

 

hi, im using the stock hdd IBM 7200rpm 30GB HDD, do u think is the harddisk was spoiled thats why it slow? im suspect that the slow is caused by the slow processor?

[DukeRaoul]

hi, im using the stock hdd IBM 7200rpm 30GB HDD, do u think is the harddisk was spoiled thats why it slow? im suspect that the slow is caused by the slow processor?

 

I looked that one up from the "IBM-DTLA-307030" listing in your XBench score...

Found this article with benchmarks:

http://www.epinions.com/content_88066330244

 

"Benchmark : I run the PCMark2002 on my PC and revealed the following data

 

HDD Score 452

Cached File Write 10.7 MB/s

Uncached File Write 13.2 MB/s

Cached File Read 19.4 MB/s

Uncached File Read 21.7 MB/s

File Copy 4.5 MB/s "

 

^^ Those numbers are not far from yours, so your drive is most likely operating normally. Next, check out this chart at Tom's Hardware:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/3-5-har...rmance,658.html

 

It shows lots of current hard drives' Average Read Performance in MegaBytes per Second. You may note that the lowest-scoring Seagate drive is 44 MB/s.

I am prejudiced, recommending the Seagate's all the time, but on that chart you can see many other fast drives as well.

Basically your hard drive is old and slow, and a more modern one would be faster. I can't explain why exactly your drive is slower, at the same 7200 RPM, other than newer stuff being more advanced.

[vailancer]

I looked that one up from the "IBM-DTLA-307030" listing in your XBench score...

Found this article with benchmarks:

http://www.epinions.com/content_88066330244

 

"Benchmark : I run the PCMark2002 on my PC and revealed the following data

 

HDD Score 452

Cached File Write 10.7 MB/s

Uncached File Write 13.2 MB/s

Cached File Read 19.4 MB/s

Uncached File Read 21.7 MB/s

File Copy 4.5 MB/s "

 

^^ Those numbers are not far from yours, so your drive is most likely operating normally. Next, check out this chart at Tom's Hardware:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/3-5-har...rmance,658.html

 

It shows lots of current hard drives' Average Read Performance in MegaBytes per Second. You may note that the lowest-scoring Seagate drive is 44 MB/s.

I am prejudiced, recommending the Seagate's all the time, but on that chart you can see many other fast drives as well.

Basically your hard drive is old and slow, and a more modern one would be faster. I can't explain why exactly your drive is slower, at the same 7200 RPM, other than newer stuff being more advanced.

 

i think is clear that the old drive are slow.. its due to the Ultra ATA/66 (ATA-5) port.. not ATA100

i'll lend a new hdd from fren see if theres any improvement. Thanks for your greatly help!

[Kane Adams]

OWC has a 1.2ghz processor with L3 cache and 100% compatible to leopard. any users here can give some opinion or feedback?

Get one of those and it will run a lot better.

[VonMagnum]

I ran into this thread while doing some Xbench testing with my new 3TB WD external USB3.0 drive on my upgraded PowerMac Digital Audio G4 that I've been using as a whole house audio/video server (ala iTunes with two AppleTV units and a few Airport Express units for 5 rooms of audio and 2 for video). I was trying to figure out why this drive which is rated for 35MB/sec with USB3.0 only gets 18-20MB/sec on USB 2.0 when 35MB/sec is WELL WITHIN the USB 2.x specs (should do up to around 50MB/sec) and in fact on my some of my WD "Passport" drives with FW400/800, they easily get that with FW400 and closer to 80MB/sec with FW800. I figured this USB 3.0 drive would do well for now until I replace this PowerMac with something newer as the server and I didn't see any 3TB drives for sale that were FW400/800, at least anywhere near the price I paid for this one (my 1.5TB drive was almost full). By comparison my internal 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda drives on the same PowerMac using the same PCI bus for the Sata card get 105MB/sec read and 92MB/sec write with XBench so I don't see how the bus itself could be the limiting factor.

 

Anyway, I was running some Xbench tests and came across this thread while searching to see if there was anything newer than XBench (hasn't been updated in 4 years). My PowerMac has a 1.8GHz 7448 G4 and 1.5GB with a Radeon 9800GT ram and runs Leopard pretty fast (61.48 total with 89 on CPU, 91 Quartz80 OpenGL, User Interface 46.8 and 62 on disk, which is mostly limited by the one random 1k uncached write and read or would otherwise be around 160) but even so, it runs Tiger a LOT faster (71 total, 85 CPU, Quartz 84, OpenGL 96, User Interface 95.6, Disk 70), although these have changed over the past two years as Leopard was updated to its final version.

 

Leopard used to be even slower, especially on OpenGL and CPU tests, which definitely got faster towards the final version. User Interface is still half Tiger's, though and while USB2.0 drivers are 2x faster under Leopard than Tiger, the overall disc scores (for Sata internal) are still lower under Leopard.

 

So while the person in this thread is bewildered, I'm still bewildered too given that Snow Leopard on my 2008 MBP (with 4GB of ram and a 500GB 7200 RPM internal SATA drive) is SLOWER than regular Leopard on the same machine! And Snow Leopard was supposed to be an OPTIMIZED version of Leopard and I don't see anything "optimized" about it other than prematurely ditching all the PPC code so that G5 Quad owners got shorted on their investment, which saved some disk space and that's about it. The simple fact is that Leopard is slower than Tiger and Snow Leopard is slower than Leopard and I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Lion will be slower than Snow Leopard and so if there's any comparison to Microsoft Vista, it should be that if you're going to "upgrade" your operating system, take care that you don't BLOAT it while you're at it. I don't see one actual "effective" feature in Snow Leopard that actually makes it worth using over Leopard (i.e. what good is Grand Central if it runs slower than without it on the same MBP running the prior OS?) except that lazy software writers like to start "requiring" the latest version of the OS regardless of any usefulness of the OS itself, thus forcing people to upgrade even if the upgrade makes their machine slower and crappier in the process.

 

The weird thing is that history of OSX was different. It started out mediocre with all kinds of issues coming over from OS9 (itself temperamental to begin with) and that each version got BETTER and FASTER than the prior versions right up until Leopard when things suddenly went South in a very noticeable way. They ditched Classic (like Snow Leopard ditched PPC) and yet things got slower. Yes, late model Intels that weren't meant to even use Tiger might be faster under Leopard, but that's largely due to driver support issues in Tiger rather than an actual problem with the OS.

 

The User Interface test is very telling. Try running one of the Intel graphics based machines with Leopard or Snow Leopard. G4s from 2002 can often get higher scores in Tiger than one of those machines running Leopard. And you can FEEL the difference (it's not just some bogus Xbench number). Yes, Macs with better GPUs fly under Leopard and Snow Leopard, but that's because their newer GPU chips take over those functions (just like Windows machines accelerate them giving Windows a "fast" feel whereas cheaper Windows machines under Vista and Win7 feel like {censored}).

 

I see the improvements in Windows7 over Vista (although my 4 year old PC still runs faster under XP than many faster hardware configs under 7 today), but it remains to be seen if Lion will show ANY improvement over Snow Leopard. Given it's almost entirely iOS type integrations in the announcements, I sincerely doubt it. They will probably (like with iOS) use it to evict many Intel machines from the OS support while they're at it, though. Apple seems to be interested in forcing you to buy new hardware every 2-3 years now, whether you need or not and they do this buy dropping OS support and 3rd party software writers (the smaller ones at least) tend to drop support for older OS releases, leading you to a "no software" problem sooner than would otherwise be the case.

 

I'm not happy about it. My "ancient" 2001 PowerMac Digital Audio upgraded to 1.8GHz G4 runs 95% of software (older versions in many cases since the newer ones dumped Universal support) at perfectly "fast" speeds. I'm using the latest Firefox right now and it feels the same as on my 2008 MBP 90% of the time. iTunes runs perfectly fast and except for HD video on the local machine runs fine (I mostly stream to my 93" 720P projector downstairs anyway for HD content). But I've already seen features like H264 hardware decoding skipped on my late 2008 MBP by Apple only one year after I bought it (despite the hardware itself being capable of it) while Windows gets enough acceleration even for Intel video on Netbooks to run HD with not problem! I prefer the OSX operating system for GUI and lack of malware compared to PCs (I mostly keep a PC around for gaming), but if Apple starts purposely turning their Macs into 2-3 old abandonware like they already have done with their iPhones, I'll have to seriously reconsider in the future. Short of gaming, most Mac users don't "need" cutting edge hardware, but it feels like Steve Jobs thinks they should get it anyway whether they want it or not.

[.ShadowFox]

You barely meeting the minimum specs does not mean Leopard should run fast, just good enough. Now you see why idiots {censored} about Vista.

No. Vista was a piece, with or without good hardware. Maybe, just maybe, if you carefully pick hardware that was made just so for Vista, you could have a chance. I had a custom built Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.66Ghz with 4GB RAM, 8800GTX, 500GB hard drive. Lags, slow downs, driver fatal stops left and right.

 

Vista was the reason I have a Mac now, anyway

 

 

As for the original posters problem. It's a matter of having too slow a computer in order for it to run properly. I had a TiBook 800Mhz with a gig of RAM, and Leopard ran... surprisingly well. Sorry to say that it isn't always like that.