Expected Speed Increase??

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g520incherg520incher
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
My current configuration is:



PowerMac G5 single 1.6 Ghz

1.5 GB DDR333 Ram

Nvidia GeForce Ultra with 64MB

OSX 10.2.8



Can I expect a big overall performance increase by upgrading to 4GB Ram (max), a 256 MB Radeon card, and OSX 10.4.1 Tiger?



I've been wanting to upgrade to a dual G5 machine but money just got very tight for me and it would be at least 6 months before i could grab a new machine. I'm trying to decide if I should just wait it out for a new machine or max out my current machine and just keep it for another year or two, saving some money.



I do a lot of rendering on a daily basis in both Vue 5 and Artmatic, and I will be writing music soon with Reason.



Thanks for any comments.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    lundylundy Posts: 4,466member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by G520incher

    Can I expect a big overall performance increase by upgrading to 4GB Ram (max), a 256 MB Radeon card, and OSX 10.4.1 Tiger?



    The effect of upgrading RAM is easier to determine than the others. To see what your current RAM is doing, make sure you have been booted up and doing a fairly typical amount of your usual work for several hours, then go into Terminal and type



    vm_stat





    and post the output.



    Once Apple enables Quartz 2-D Extreme in Tiger, more video RAM is going to be potentially useful. How much so is hard to predict. 64 seems to be OK, but large amounts of screen drawing will benefit from more.



    Most people found Tiger to be faster than Panther, and Panther was a huge speedup over Jaguar. So odds are you will benefit from the OS upgrade.
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  • Reply 2 of 4
    ragingloogieragingloogie Posts: 426member
    if your able to do your work easily/no problems and no slowed speeds(not sure if that change results but it annoys me when something isnt fast enough) then i would prolly wait.. but upgrading would polly be a lot easier
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  • Reply 3 of 4
    messiahmessiah Posts: 1,689member
    RAM doesn't increase the speed of your machine - it stops your machine from slowing down when you have a lot of memory hungry apps running at the same time.



    That's an important difference to grasp. If you aren't running tons of memory intensive apps the RAM will simply sit idle.



    I upgraded from 512MB to 4GB, and to be honest, I think I would have been fine with 2GB, but the demands you place on your system will be entirely different.



    Mac OS X Tiger allows the system to offload a lot of the heavy graphics lifting to your graphics card (which is a common sense way of dealing with the problem). The more powerful your graphics card, the more relief it will provide to your system as a whole. This is why systems with powerful cards oftem outperform standard spec machines even although everything else is equal.



    I currently have a dual 1.8GHz, with a NVIDIA 6800, 4GB of RAM and a Raptor RAID 0 system. In hindsight, I would probably have seen better results had I just gone out and purchased a bog standard dual 2.7GHz... hope this helps!
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  • Reply 4 of 4
    messiahmessiah Posts: 1,689member
    The current issue of MacUser (UK) has an interesting article on upgrades.



    They test RAM, hard disk and graphic card upgrades in PM G4 and PM G5 computers.
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