Mac OS X Leopard (Performance on PowerPC Macs [G4, G5])

Mac OS X Leopard running on a PowerBook G4

Specs:
Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.8)
1.67Ghz PowerPC G4
1GB RAM (333Mhz DDR)
80GB 5400rpm PATA HDD
ATI 9700 (128MB VRAM)

NOTE: Since making this video, I sold the PowerBook, but I also now have a Power Mac G5 (dual 2.3Ghz, ATI 9650 [256MB VRAM]), SATA hard drives at 7200rpm, and 2GB DDR memory), and the Power Mac runs Leopard great. All in all, I'd only recommend Leopard if you have a Power Mac G5 or one of the last generations of the PowerBook G4 and have at least 1GB RAM because Leopard is a much more demanding OS than Tiger (well, it was designed for Intel machines anyway...), doesn't offer much much more to the average user, and it costs a lot.

Enjoy!

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• powerbook
• power
• book
• g4
• g5
• ppc
• powerpc
• pc
• mac
• macintosh
• motorola
• ibm
• os
• 10
• 10.5
• leopard
• 10.5.8
• performance
• speed

[FruityDC]

Upgraded my G4 1.3ghz, 1.3GB to Leopard and it runs like a loser. Youtube Video so choppy it only shows 20% of the time. Any video files for that matter lags. Gladly sold it off for $40bucks, thats how little I think its even worth! Macs? no thanks

[backstageblues]

@FruityDC Well of course an old G4 like that running Leopard isn't going to run modern video any bit well! Even this one with maximum specs they ever made for a G4 was pretty bad. It obviously wasn't optimized to run YouTube 7-8 years after it was made! One with higher specs and Tiger runs great for basic tasks such as basic internet browsing, email, iTunes, and word processing.

[ayusakir]

hi, what a nice video, thanks for sharing! is there a big different of speed between running on tiger and leopard? i think the "spaces"and "quicktlook" functions are really useful for my daily use that are the reason why i wanna upgrade it to leopard. but is it worth to do it? sorry for my bad english lol thanks! my powerbook spec: 1.67Ghz PowerPC G4 2GB RAM (333Mhz DDR) 100GB 5400rpm PATA HDD ATI 9700 (128MB VRAM)

[backstageblues]

@ayusakir Performance didn't really noticeably decrease. I've sold my PowerBook since making this video, but it worked fine, and my machine had the same specs as your's (but with only 1GB RAM). While some of the features are nice, they don't justify high cost of upgrading such an old machine. Most copies found on eBay run at $150...I purchased my PowerBook for only $100 more than that! The cost doesn't justify itself, and it's really not worth upgrading from Tiger.

[olliekill]

should i upgraid my powerbook G4 2 leopard because it the moment im running tiger

please tell me if i should or not

[backstageblues]

@olliekill I sold my PowerBook last month because I couldn't develop for Snow Leopard (for the Mac App Store) efficiently on a machine only running Leopard. I only went to Leopard in the first place so I could use Objective-C 2.0. Obtaining a copy of Leopard is much more money than it's worth. And unless you have a PowerBook with the GPU upgrade (the ATI 9700 chip with 128MB VRAM) and at least 1GB RAM and absolutely need to run Leopard-only software, I wouldn't advise upgrading from Tiger.

[Kuckti15]

I myself just got a G4 from ebay for about $250, runs great! 1.33GHz, 512MB of RAM, 35GB HDD, OSX 10.4.11 Tiger. I originally got it for Arduino development, since it was low powered and cheap, good for what I need. But to my surprise, it actually handles YouTube pretty well with a few manual optimizations, as well as chat, mail, etc. It's not a bad all around computer, especailyl for what I paid for it!

[intelcore2duo43]

@eP1TaH Basically to sum what what I said, Snow Leopard was not considered to be a major release, just an upgrade.

[intelcore2duo43]

@eP1TaH All of the major releases of OSX were $129 at retail. When Snow Leopard came out in 2009, it was concerted as an "upgrade from Leopard" to were you had to be running 10.5.8 to run run Snow Leopard. Snow Leoaprd was the same as Leopard when it first came out just with "under the hood" modifications. With Leopard and previous versions of OSX you could run any version of OSX and upgrade. Lion, carried the $29 price tag to make it more affordable.

[tigresslover]

@FruityDC I have the same powerbook as you. The main reason why youtube sucks for PPC is because the flash code is shitty and broken. Once PPC essentially died, Adobe spent less and less time on building the proper code for flash video and whatnot. Now all new versions of flash have abandoned PPC all together. I bought my G4 back in 09 and videos on youtube worked quite well until Adobe released version 9 or 10 flash player. It was all downhill there after.

[dellarsoul]

You say "Ah... Ah" a lot

[eP1TaH]

Why is leopard now more expensive than snow leopard and like 5x the price of lion... wtf?

[haxfactory]

@topflightmexican leopard runs for more than the cost of the laptop. the only downside is finding software for tiger. these days you actually have to scout around a bit for them because typically you wont be able to use the newest versions of the software. however, considering $75 is about half the cost of a low end netbook, it's a bargin.

[haxfactory]

@FruityDC it really isn't the macs fault. to be honest flash performance sucks on just about anything without hardware acceleration for h.264 video. sadly h.264 acceleration wasn't a feature of graphics cards of the time. you really should be expecting anything more than 360-480p when it's running on just a processor (not a gpu) from like 2003. perhaps a high end G5 could handle 720p?

[haxfactory]

@ayusakir i'm sure you've decided whether or not to upgrade by now, but leopard does use a bit more ram and uses the remaining harddrive space as a cache. so with the ram maxed out and with an upgrade to a 7200 rpm harddrive it would work especially well. in my experience running on even lower end macs (with leopard assist) it really mostly wants more ram.

[haxfactory]

I'm watching this on a PowerMac G4 867 Dual...at 480p.

You should be able to handle 480p, except perhaps in full screen.

Full screen is pretty slow, it's passable on 360p though.