OS7.6.1 vs 7.5.5 for 9600

[Syntho]

I have a 9600. After some investigation, I read that 7.6 isn’t compatible with a bunch of PowerMacs including the 9600, but 7.6.1 is. Not sure why. So it got me thinking about the earliest OS a 9600 can run, 7.5.

From what I’ve seen, people have said 7.6.1 is better for PowerMacs compared to 7.5. Would you agree with that, or do you think 7.5 would be good enough?

 

[Byrd]

Neither, unless you really like the look and feel of System 7. A late PCI PPC such as this OS 8.6 and above will run just as fast with much needed HFS+ support. The sweet spot is OS 9.1 if you have no OS X plans.

 

[Cory5412]

This also depends on what particular 9600 you have, there are two versions. The original type, in up to 200MHz (the /233 upgrade and the MP versions are in this category, if I remember correctly)  and the Kansas/Mach5 (250 and up) versions.

The original should run 7.5.5 and the Mach5 requires a machine-specific version of 7.6.1, which if I'm remembering correctly has some enablers

If you want system 7, I'd run 7.6.1, for most systems that'll run both, especially on the PowerPC side of things. 7.6.1, in general, has a lot of boosts over 7.5.x for PowerPC, such as reducing the amount of 68k code and revamping certain subsystems.

I have an 8600/300 and in my experience 9.1 runs really well on these machines (at least with the /300 chip and like 200 megs of RAM), but if you have a slower one or otherwise  a low end one, especially with less than 128mb of ram, then a better settling point might be on 8.1, which gets you HFS+, more PPC code still, but doesn't use that much memory.