Still Damn Slow |
October, 13, 2002 5:59 PM |
esmith |
I got a 9600, the 800 MHZ G4, I have 256 megs of RAM, I have a 80 gig HD... Why is Jaguar still SLOW on my machine... MS Office is usable, but compared to a 1 ghz Windows 2000 machine or even the venerable System 9.1 incarnation... What else can I do except buy a new Mac... |
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Netiquette |
October, 16, 2002 7:37 AM |
OSXGuru |
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I have down a little editing on this thread to cure a couple of blatant netiquette problems. Do I really have to remind people not to call each other names? |
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RE: Still Damn Slow |
October, 15, 2002 5:35 PM |
marcush |
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Well, I was not arguing that an oldworld desktop machine was comparable to a new desktop. Of course, it's not. However, they are more than adequate for day-to-day uses. They are also capable of much more. I use Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro with this machine and am quite happy to do so until I shell out for a new Mac, which looks like it won't be until the new IBM Power 4 processors appear in Apple's lineup. Webmaster814, the two 64MB DIMMS were only installed for a few weeks until I got around to replacing them with another set of 128MB DIMMS. The Nexus card may very well have a faster RAMDAC than either of the Radeon models. ATI's online documentation does not state this for the Nexus 128 as far as I've seen. That being said, it uses the SLOWER Rage 128 graphics processor chip and non-DDR memory. Also, you note that it is the fastest 2D card for OSX. How can that be when it's base technology is older than the Orion's, and 2D acceleration is handed off by OSX's window server to the main processor. Under these conditions CPU speed is the determining factor. Therefore, it seems to be quite a stretch to say that it is faster than either variant of the Radeon PCI card. I suggest you read the the article at Arstechnica which explains in detail the workings of OSX's graphics subsystem. Here's the URL: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/02q3/macosx-10.2/macosx-10.2-8.html#ent er-qe |
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RE: Still Damn Slow |
October, 15, 2002 3:25 PM |
timjudym |
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There is no way your computer in osX mode will ever be as fast as it is in its native os9. Its should not be slow, but 9 will always feel faster, if you want os9 speed you will need to buy a new machine. BTW..The orion is a 16mb card, its t he nexus that is 32mb. |
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RE: Still Damn Slow |
October, 15, 2002 2:44 PM |
webmaster814 |
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By the way, I have the fastest OldWorldMachine on the planet: PowerMac 9600 350, updgraded to 600watt Power Supply, G4 800mhz, ATI Rage Orion 32mb, 1.5 gig of ram, 1 x 2GB UltraSCSI Jaz Drive, 1x Pionner Superdrive Apple OEM, 1 X 144X CDROM UltraSCSI, , 3X Apple Ultra160 SCSI PCI Card, 1 X Apple 9600/233 Case converted to External UltraSCSI Case with 6x Mac Gurus PCI coolers, and 4 X Mac Gurus Hard Drive Coolers, 5 X 181.6GB Seagate Barracudas 180 7200rpm, 1 X USB 2.0 4 Port Card, and 4 port GigaBit EtherNet PCI Card!. Have Apple 22" Studio Display connected to the Orion via DVIator. Only use 2 drives per UltraSCSI card, this reduce lactency of the bus. Michael |
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RE: Still Damn Slow |
October, 15, 2002 2:41 PM |
webmaster814 |
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After rereading this, I would have to correct myself, I ment to say the Nexus, not Orion, sorry. The Nexus is the fastest graphics card on an Old World Machine. Michael |
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RE: Still Damn Slow |
October, 15, 2002 2:38 PM |
webmaster814 |
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No you are plain wrong. The reason why you noticed a speed increase in your machine is because you replaced you 64mb chips with higher quality 128mb chips. Secondly, you are mistaken the Orion has 32mb of Video Ram, and it is the fastest X 2D card ever made. Michael |
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RE: Still Damn Slow |
October, 15, 2002 1:38 PM |
marcush |
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Here are a few more points I forgot to mention. I have an iBook 500 which my wife mainly uses. I find that my Power Tower Pro is a faster machine in all respects. SpeedRun benchmark results give my Power Tower Pro higher scores than an iMac G4 700 and approximately an equal score to a Dual G4 500 machine. Bus speed and graphics seem to be the bottlenecks, which is not unexpected. Also, I have enabled Quartz Extreme on my machine and have to say that every process that offloads to the graphics card has definitely sped up. Watching DVD's and playing quicktime movies at full screen is smooth. I can move around the DVD and Quicktime player windows during playback with no drop in framerates. I can even open tranparent terminal windows over the DVD player and have no drop in framerate. Shaking a transparent terminal window in front of either player will cause audio and framerate dropouts, but who does this anyway. iTunes never misses a beat though. As has been reported, QE does saturate the PCI bus so video intensive tasks can experience these problems when pushed to the limits. For instance, when I'm going to do work in Final Cut Pro I disable QE to avoid getting dropped frames during the capture process or during rendering. For casual tasks such as web browsing, email, and watching DVD's ,etc., QE is great! |
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RE: Still Damn Slow |
October, 15, 2002 1:23 PM |
marcush |
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webmaster814 is just plain wrong. For one, more RAM does help. Last week I added 128MB to the 768MB that I already had in my machine and I noticed an immediate speed improvement over what I had previously seen in Jaguar, which itself provided a speed boost over 10.1.5. On Saturday I removed the two 64MB DIMMs that got me up to 896MB RAM and put them back in my Power Center Pro Linux machine. I added two new OWC 128MB DIMMs to get me up to 1Gig of RAM. Among the reasons that your system may be running slow are, of course, RAM. 512MB is the minimum for OSX in my opinion. The problem is that when you run out of main memory the system will start creating swap files on your hard drive. The more frequently the system needs to access it's swap file the more disc activity that is going to generate and that is going to slow down your system tremendously. If you hear constant disk access, even when opening menus and such then your system is starved for RAM and you WILL see perfromance drop to a crawl right before your eyes. After I went to 768MB of RAM I never heard disk access again except when launching an app. Even after leaving the machine on for a few days I never had more than 100 pageouts to disk. So suffice it to say that on this subject the "webmaster" is completely and utterly wrong. Get more RAM. You will not regret it. Another point on which webmaster814 is utterly and hopelessly incorrect is the Video question. A Radeon 7000 will not hurt your performance in the least. In fact, it should boost it considerably. It has 32MB of DDR RAM. In contrast, Orion card only has 16MB of RAM onboard. Why this guy (or girl?) would recommend that you deliberately starve the window server is beyond me. Of course, the best card for oldworld machines is the original Radeon Mac Edition PCI. It is a faster card than the Radeon 7000. The Radeon 7000, however, does extremely well. From what I've seen of webmaster814's comments I can only conclude that his/her 9600 is misconfigured and that he/she lacks sufficient understanding of the hardware and software issues, which are not terribly significant, required to have smooth OSX operation on our older machines. I'm sorry to be so blunt in a public forum but I find webmaster's comments so irritating and misleading that I felt a need to speak out. From what you've written so far on your system configuration I can say without reservation that you have a good base system from which to start. The only weakness in your configuration is the amount of RAM you have. Your system is definitely paging to disk excessively. Add another 512MB of RAM and the slowness you are seeing will definitely dissapear. Email me if you have any questions. I'll be more than happy to help you resolve any other issues. Here are my system specs for reference: Power Tower Pro 225, Sonnet G4 800, 1Gig RAM (all OWC), Toshiba SD-R1202 DVD/CD-RW, Quantum Plus AS 20GB 7200rpm, IBM 120GXP 60GB 7200rpm, IBM 120GXP 120GB 7200rpm, 2x IBM DGHS 9.1GB 7200rpm UW SCSI (RAID 0), 30GB Quantum Plus AS in OWC Mercury Pro Firewire case, Pioneer DVR-104 in OWC Firewire Case. ACARD ATA/133 controller, ATTO UL2D Ultra 160 SCSI controller, Ratoc Firewire/USB2.0 controller, Macsense 10/100 Ethernet, Radeon 32MB Mac Edition, 3dfx Voodoo 5 5500. |
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RE: Still Damn Slow |
October, 15, 2002 10:38 AM |
webmaster814 |
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Well, I know that when i'm using my 700mhz ibook, and playing a quicktime movie and scroll the movie around it continues to play smooth without any video/audio problems. However, when I do this on my Powermac 9600 it seems like its retrarded. The only answer is that the problem resides with the slow ram used in OldWorldMachines, and with the slow bus speed. Hope this helps. So to answer your question, the speed you are recieving is normal, its just the way things are.. Michael |
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RE: Still Damn Slow |
October, 14, 2002 11:53 PM |
esmith |
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I "got" more RAM but the chips that OWC provided crashed the machine... They are exchanging them... The cache is enabled using the Powerlogix enabler. That is not a problem... I'm just saying that when I type things or scroll up and down... It seems to be stalling as compared to Office 98 under 9.1. |
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RE: Still Damn Slow |
October, 14, 2002 10:54 PM |
webmaster814 |
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Speed will never seem "fast" on OldWorldMachines. In terms of RAM anything over 512mb is pointless. There are no gains on the architecture past 512mb. Also make sure L2 Cache is set. You may want to look into a new video card, I would stay clear of the 7000. I would recommend the ATI Rage Orion, seems to be the best card on OldWorldMachines. Michael |
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RE: Still Damn Slow |
October, 14, 2002 9:27 PM |
powderhaus |
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More RAM! microsoft stuff are ram guzzlers. and there is a hack to enable QE with the PCI version of the radeon but i forget what it is. (i dont have 10.2 but i read about it) and L2 cache is a must have I use the L2cacheconfig works great! |
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RE: Still Damn Slow |
October, 14, 2002 7:36 AM |
timjudym |
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Are you running the L2 cache properly? When i upgraded to jaguar my first thought was SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!! But with my XLR8 card the software was not supported under 10.2 so i needed to get some software from PowerLogix and then the speed was GREAT! |
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RE: Still Damn Slow |
October, 13, 2002 7:24 PM |
blel |
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I did not find the PCI video card to be of much help. Most people with the ATI 7000 seem to be running without QE enabled. More ram (which is now very cheap) helps, but OSX is never going to be a fireball on these older machines. |
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RE: Still Damn Slow |
October, 13, 2002 7:09 PM |
gte950h |
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get a PCI video card which is supported by quartz extreme. the radeon 7000 for instance. -b |
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