(Old Pentium 4 PCs) 10.6 vs 10.5 vs 10.4

[TOS 1.04]

As the title says, is it worth while trying to get the latest OS (i.e. 10.6) running on really old hardware with only SSE2 capable CPUs, or is it better and more stable and compatible to stick with 10.4/5 ... I currently have two hackintoshes and they are both pentium 4s with only SSE2. The integrated intel GPUs on both of them are way to old for anything but vesa support.

 

The first one has 10.4.8 on it from an old JaS package (i set this up a number of years ago). This has turned out to be mostly quite stable, it uses the semthex kernel and i'm pretty ignorant of most of the custom kexts because they came with the installation. (Posting from this installation)

 

The second more recent project is a HP D530 motherboard with an AGP nVidia Quadro FX700 which is supposed to use the same chip as the GeForce FX5200/5600. I've tried to get 10.6.4 running on it, i used a vanilla install (installed and updated via a separate machine) and a separate EFI boot partition with the basic kexts, kernels and DSDT.

 

Now i have it running... but it's quite buggy and unstable, i've tried the legacy_kernel (10.4), and the chocolate kernel (but not sure which version!) and they both act buggy, had a few kernel panics, graphics are bit messed up and slow in vesa mode, sometimes apps hang for no apparent reason (including finder quite frequently)... Now i'm not sure whether this instability is the result of trying to run 10.6 on such and old piece of kit, or that OS 10.6 just requires working graphics acceleration to function properly.

 

I'm currently trying to lever some GeForce FX5200 compatible kexts from 10.5.6 into the installation to get the Quadro FX700 working, but it requires messing with core frameworks and i think the versions might be too different for 10.6.

 

Does anyone happen to know if 10.4 can support a GeForce FX5200/5600 or Quadro FX700?

 

Thanks for any of your thoughts.

 

[edit]

 

ok quick and lazy question now... i've tried using all the info i can find online but this GPU is just leaving me confused now. When i Search for the nVidia Quadro FX700 device id (0x10DE033F) i come across the chameleon nvinjector source code, it's listed as recognized and supported by OS X... but i've tried that injector and it isn't recognized until i enter the EFI string... then when it is recognized if i don't remove the native nVidia kexts the system doesn't boot.

 

what am i doing wrong?