PowerMac 8600 OS X Performance?
Hi all,
I have a PowerMac 8600 with a G3 card (Sonnet) running at 333 Mhz with 1 MB of L2 cache running at 166 MHz. The benchmark performance is actually impressive, placing the overall system performance to only be 5% slower than a PowerMac G3 (beige).
How well can I expect this computer to run OS X?
Assuming that I interleave the RAM and populate its banks a bit to give it 512 MB or 1 GB of RAM and drop in a newer PCI Radeon graphics card will it be fairly fast?
I do not expect to do a ot of intense work on it ike Photoshop, just basically web surfing, iLife applications and porductivity apps along with some lower end scroller OS X games.
I have a PowerMac 8600 with a G3 card (Sonnet) running at 333 Mhz with 1 MB of L2 cache running at 166 MHz. The benchmark performance is actually impressive, placing the overall system performance to only be 5% slower than a PowerMac G3 (beige).
How well can I expect this computer to run OS X?
Assuming that I interleave the RAM and populate its banks a bit to give it 512 MB or 1 GB of RAM and drop in a newer PCI Radeon graphics card will it be fairly fast?
I do not expect to do a ot of intense work on it ike Photoshop, just basically web surfing, iLife applications and porductivity apps along with some lower end scroller OS X games.
Comments
And if by "low end scroller games" you mean Deimos Rising, then yes that'll run fine. That even ran okay on my brother's Rev. B iMac, and on my PowerBook G3/233.
2D graphics speed is limited by the slow motherboard chip. Even with a 200 MHz 604 CPU a good card will double the speed and with 300 MHz G3 even more with a radeon card you will be able to play games like Quake III, Unreal, UT, Oni Sin Gold and many other.
However you will never get near a modern computer due to lack of AGP and the OS X support is dubious so I would not spend 1 GB of RAM on such a old computer.
I run X on a 7300/200 with 156 MB of RAM and it is OK, slow like OS 8.6 on a 7200/90. (only used for distributed computing)
A 7500 with 350 Mhz G3/512 k L2 and 320 MB is better but the screen redraws still are slow. To bad my 3dfx V3000 card does not work in X. Webbrowsing and such is OK. I have not tried any games. With a 2GB HD it is very hard to fit anything in there exept the OS
Is that an easy thing to do? I've never attempted to use X on anything without USB, so I don't know how much of a hassle it is to set up, but I don't think it will install right out of the box on that machine.
From what I hear, 512MB for this computer should only cost about $80 (since it has 8 RAM slots).
2D graphics speed is limited by the slow motherboard chip. Even with a 200 MHz 604 CPU a good card will double the speed and with 300 MHz G3 even more with a radeon card you will be able to play games like Quake III, Unreal, UT, Oni Sin Gold and many other.
Impressive! I already have the 333 MHz G3 on-board and the 604ev chip is gone. I never expected to be able to play those games but that is a glimmer of hope!
Right now the computer only has 64 MB of RAM and an ix3D Twin Turbo so I am not even going to ttempt OS X until I get A LOT more RAM and a Radeon card.
(one of the benefits to this old machine is although HD space is limited, it supports 4 HDs easily.)
Spec:
PM8500
G4/800
radeon 7000 pci
512MB (interleaved)
3x 9.1GB 72K rpm scsi
adaptec 2930CU scsi pci card
firewire/USB 2.0 pci card
I only paid for the ram(4x 128MB - $100 at OWC), scsi Hard drives($27 for three 9.1 GB drives on ebay), and adaptec scsi card($9 on ebay).
Anyways, everything runs pretty good on OS X 10.2.8, but only thing that bothers me is the 2d performance. This should improve on Panther (10.3)as shown on G3 older machines & some older portable computers, but until XPostFacto 3.0 comes out, we'll never know.
I've also tried running on Newertech G3 400/200 card, and it seems to handle OS X just fine. Once again, 2D performance sucks on OS X 10.2.x for older macs even with pci graphic cards.
Even if the benchmarks show impressive results, but the slow ram and graphic performances somewhat kills the overall performance.
e.g.: I get about 100 points for CPU on Xbench 1.1.3 with G4/800, but my memory write performance scores 10 with 55mb/sec.
Mac OS X is very memory intensive OS, and the slow ram will hurt the most other than the slower hard drive.
If you are planing to spend more than $250 to $350 to restore your old PM8600, it's better to just get older G4 or B&W G3 mac off ebay.
Originally posted by Henriok
I was under the impression that Jaguar wouldn't install on Pre G3 systems, even with XPostFacto, or was it just an issue with the processor not being G3 or better? Can you actually install Jaguar on a Tsunami generation Mac if you have a processor upgrade? Id really like to upgrade my 7600.. It runs 10.1 pretty well even if it took me about 5 hs to install.
AFAIK It's just a 'processor not g3' issue, and 604e may work as well. Upgrade to G3 and Jag should run fine with XPostFacto
Originally posted by bobbymac333
No one has mentioned the slower disk performance from your older fast scsi drives. They will max at 10mb/s transfer so this may be your biggest bottleneck. Doesn't mean it won't run...
Well, 10MB/s in SCSI terms equals to 100Mb/s in ATA terms.. so this is somewhat equal to UltaATA/100. However, IIRC the built-in SCSI of old macs is just 5MB/s.
I sometimes forget when I'm using it that it isn't the beige desktop G3/233 it replaced.
I put a Tempo Trio ATA/133 card in it, which gives me USB 2.0 (high speed), Firewire 400, and, two ATA/133 channels. My hard drive performance with a Western Digital Caviar 60 GB drive is, overall, not far off from my MDD G4, believe it or not.
I have an ATI Radeon 7000 graphics card in there too. I can squeeze more than 30 fps out of it in iTunes visuals, and with Quartz Extreme enabled, things in the finder move very smoothly.
It chokes to death on anything memory-intensive, even with 768 MB RAM, All OWC 128 MB chips, interleaved.
This is probably because of the biggest problem with upgrading an 8xxx/9xxx machine: You'll never get the bus above 60 MHz, and never above 50 MHz with any stability.
So don't expect performance any better than early-revision iMacs with this kind of setup. But it's very useful.
Originally posted by Juha Otus
Well, 10MB/s in SCSI terms equals to 100Mb/s in ATA terms.. so this is somewhat equal to UltaATA/100. However, IIRC the built-in SCSI of old macs is just 5MB/s.
ATA is measured in MB/sec (not Mb/s), so 10MB/s SCSI is roughly 1/3 of Ultra ATA/33 and 1/10th of Ultra ATA/100.
The 7x/8x/9xxx-class powermacs had 2 SCSI busses: a 5MB/sec external bus and a 10MB/sec internal bus. Both are slow by today's standards, and dropping in a SCSI or IDE card with new disks makes a world of difference. I noticed a huge performance increase when I upgraded from the internal SCSI bus to ATA/66 on my 7600.
Originally posted by ryaxnb
Upgrade to G3 and Jag should run fine with XPostFacto
It does! Thanks!