G4 Digital Audio 533 Questions...

[bigD]

Hello all - I just picked up one of these guys from Craigslist for $20, and would like to build it into a decent box for Tiger. But I've been out of the OS X game for a long time, and have some questions. I don't do anything computationally intensive, but a slow UI drives me nuts. Will a decent video card and a good chunk of RAM be enough to make Tiger run well on 533MHz, or should I be looking to upgrade its processor?

What about the RAM? What's a good place to get PC133 for it, and is there anything I should watch out for? Or do I just shop price?

I have a spare 128MB nVidia 6200 AGP card for it, which I'll flash and do the pin taping thing soon. Will this card have enough oomph for Tiger? I'm not a gamer, so it's only gonna be pushing QE.

Thanks all for the help!

 

[Patrickool93]

I'm sure it will be plenty fast. My 500mhz iBook G3 is nice and quick on tiger with only 320mb of RAM. A nice price too!

 

[madmax_2069]

heh, you picked up the same system i have. you will not see a slow UI period wit this.

mine is a 533mhz, 512mb, 40GB HDD, Geforce 2 MX 32mb vram AGP 4x. 10/100/1000baset ethernet. built in option for wifi ( not installed). mine has a DVD ROM drive as well.

i am planning to buy ram either from OWC, or DMS. make sure you get CL2.2.2 PC133 and not the slower CL3.2.2 PC133or CL3.3.3 PC133 ram. yes it will be $4-$5 more per stick but i think its worth the extra.

the 6200 might do good for you, i have seen allot of complaints about the performance of them, but they was installed in cubes (they have 2x AGP vs the 4x AGP in DA G4)

here is my plan for mine.

Fastmac dual 7455 1.4ghz upgeade

eVGA 6800 GT

120GB HDD

1.5GB ram

airport card (i dont know what all version can go into it)

and a CD/DVD combo burner ( i will stick with Pioneer DVR seres)

but yea you will not see a slow GUI at all, VLC play's real great on it. halo even runs on it

this thing will run circles around my AIO and Yikes 400 in everything with ease

 

[MacMan]

I have a 466MHz G4 Digital Audio and I can tell you that it is more than powerful enough to run Tiger well. Mine has 768MB of RAM but if you can find 512MB PC133 sticks you can upgrade as far as 1.5GB. 512MB or over is sufficient for using Tiger effectively. There are three RAM slots, mine has 256MB in each, and 256MB PC133 sticks are quite easy to find cheaply these days (I got mine from scrap PIII PCs).

Incidentally my G4 still has the stock Rage 128 Pro (16MB VRAM) card and it is fine for pretty much all basic tasks under Tiger. It does occasionally struggle a little with rendering high-quality video but this doesn't cause me much trouble.

The Digital Audio G4's still have alot of life left in them and will possibly be able to run Leopard when it finally comes out. Tiger is by far the fastest version of OS X you can run on them and the DA will behave basically like a modern machine.

 

[Quadraman]

I have a 533 with 896megs and a flashed Radeon 9700 and it runs Tiger just fine.

 

[Bunsen]

Mine's still in pieces, but I picked up a pretty cheap dual 533 CPU module from olde mac milt - it was about $70 including shipping to Australia.

 

[bigD]

Thanks all for the reports. I'm typing this out on the machine right now, and it's pretty nice under 10.2. It has 384 megs of RAM, and I'll install Tiger once I drop another 512MB stick in it.

 

[madmax_2069]

tiger ran on my Yikes G4 with 256mb ( it was a little bit slow) allot of disk swapping. i later put 384mb in it and was much faster. but 512mb is the bare minimum i would go to have a good tiger experience ( really that isn't enough to satisfy tigers thirst for ram)

 

[bigD]

Just as an update - I installed the RAM (for 896MB total), put in a Sony DVD burner, and installed 10.4. It's awesome. I'm amazed by how well the thing performs, given its age. I'm not even bothering flashing my GeForce 6200 - the GeForce 2 MX is just fine.

I'm so impressed that it's now my main box - replacing my Ubuntu Athlon 2400+ machine. Eventually I'll drop a faster or dual G4 daughtercard in this, but for the time being 533MHz is just fine. Amazing that I 'downgraded' from 2GHz and am just as happy.

Thanks all for your input! I'm sure I'll have more questions as time goes on....

 

[madmax_2069]

the GeForce 2 MX isn't bad but but lacks a few features the 6200 has. the 6200 supports both QE (quarts extreme) and CI (core image) wile the GF2MX only supports QE.

i also think the 6200 might even give a bit of a performance boost when compared to the GF2MX. but the 6200 is a low end card of the Geforce 6 series cards

 

[bigD]

Thanks for the heads up madmax. What is it that core image does for me?

 

[Quadraman]

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/coreimage/

 

[bigD]

Hmm...for some reason that link doesn't work for me. But I did some searching and learned about it. I wonder if it'll make a noticable difference for me?

 

[madmax_2069]

yea, it will help out. and will make a noticeable difference

what QE and CI do is offload those things to the GFX card and free up the cpu to do other things

 

[Quadraman]

It looks like Apple updated the site when they made the Leopard announcement and deleted the Core Image page.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/coreanimation.html

 

[madmax_2069]

thats Apple for ya

web archive might have it

EDIT yep they do

web archive Apple coreimage

 

[Quadraman]

I tried checking the wayback machine, it was taking forever to load so I just posted the Core Animation link instead since it is related to Core Image.

 

[madmax_2069]

yea web archive is like that most of the times

 

[bigD]

Thanks all!

I now have the 6200 successfully running in this thing. Flashing and taping up the pins didn't take long at all, and worked like a charm. Profiler is now reporting that both QE and CI is supported.

Next up is a processor upgrade and a SATA card for a fast, large hard drive. But those don't have to happen right away - the system is plenty usable as it is.

Very cool!