mac mini 1.25 would i notice?

IMHO ... no
Tiger will always run faster on that hardware than Leopard because it was designed for it. Leopard was designed for the sort of power that was available on brand new machines when it was released.

I have the same spec mini sitting on a shelf & you've just inspired me to reinstall Tiger & get it back in action. I upgraded it to Leopard while my Dad was using it, but it was pretty slow so I replaced it with an intel 2.0 mini

Upgrading to 1GB RAM will definitely help, but Leopard is a bit slow on those G4s. An HDD upgrade might help too.
I had once Leopard on a 1GHz G4 with 1.25GB RAM and it was not fun. Tiger is faster on those machines.

There must be something wrong with your mac mini as Leo with a 1GHz+ processor should be able to run comfortably.

What exactly is slow to you?

mabaker said:

There must be something wrong with your mac mini as Leo with a 1GHz+ processor should be able to run comfortably.

What exactly is slow to you?

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It is the 512MB RAM I guess, at that Mac is barely touching the minimum system requirements.

ok everybody has a different opinion about what is slow? and what is acceptable ?and what is fast ?
i have 3 eMac's 1.42's with 2gb ram and i tried leopard on one even bought that disc , and for me it was unacceptable slow , didn't offer classic so i went back to tiger which is now my operating system of choice for all my Mac's really , i find tiger has less flashy eye candy the leopard which in my opinion is just a waste of processing power

but you can make leopard faster ,if you are good in the terminal disable all of the eye candy in leopard
so in my opinion leopard is only good for a second partition if you need to sync your newer iphone or ipod

Overclock that mini to 1.5ghz (search for a how to) and max it out at 1gb ram. They go great!!!
I miss my old one...

Keep it on Tiger! Leopard on my 1.33ghz Powerbook feels like Tiger on my 700mhz iMac G4. Awesome deal, by the way.

nah, there is no stuffing around with solder, as you can just flick the resistor off.. (however, if you stuff it up and remove the wrong resistor, then you /will/ have to re-solder them back on)

made a big diff when i had mine, and it ran stable for the whole 3 years that i had it..

also that drive will make a difference

guess your problem was ram.
In the other day a friend of mine lent me a core duo macbook with 1gb and tiger,the thing was sloooww,after putting 2x1Gb it doesn't even seem the same machine.
I believe 2x1Gb and leopard you would be fine

PPC mac mini has a 1 gb ram limit.

I can tell you from loads of PPC/Leo experience that the main thing holding you back is lack of RAM and a Core Image compatible GPU.

Leo needs a minimum of 2GB RAM to run smooth even though the system requirements say 1GB they mean as a minimum. So with 512MB you had half the minimum needed. As already mentioned though you can only go to 1GB on a PPC mini.

When it comes to GPU Leo really needs Core Image support and the PowerPC Mini has a Radeon 9200 which only supports Quartz Extreme. Quartz only handles simple stuff like expose or window minimizing. Core Image on the other hand is truly at the core of the OS and offloads most of the graphic work to the GPU. Quartz uses the GPU also but not in nearly as rigorous a way and the CI GPU's are also far more capable and faster.

My G4 Sawtooth (11 years old now) with a 1.8GHz G4, 2GB RAM and a Geforce 6200 which supports Core Image runs Leo great.

In my experience on PPC systems Tiger is only noticeably faster when you do not have at least 1GB RAM and Core Image support. On my setup Tiger is seriously only about 3-5% faster.

hm strange as it would indicate that leopard would have been quiet fast on my eMac 1.42 as it has a ati radeon 9600 which supports both quarz and core image , and it had full 2gb ram , but leopard was really slow ,about 25%slower then tiger and thats a optimistic guess it felt more like half the processing power was gone

MacHamster68 said:

hm strange as it would indicate that leopard would have been quiet fast on my eMac 1.42 as it has a ati radeon 9600 which supports both quarz and core image , and it had full 2gb ram , but leopard was really slow ,about 25%slower then tiger and thats a optimistic guess it felt more like half the processing power was gone

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I cannot speak for emac performance as I have never owned one. My results though are certainly accurately described.

One thing I have noticed over the years is that Apple's consumer systems tend to not perform as well as powermacs even when the consumer systems have a faster bus and RAM.

Edit: Another thought about your video is that it only has 64MB VRAM. When it comes to Macs at least the VRAM is needed more for OS level stuff much more than any gaming you may do. My Geforce 6200 has 256MB VRAM and within 10 min. of a reboot at least 180MB of the 256MB is being consumed. When you combine Core Image, Core Video, Core Animation and Quartz Extreme in a single OS like 10.5+ is you need a crapload of VRAM. Even 128MB isn't enough and that is double what your eMac has.

Those are the only reasons I can think of that your results would be different than mine.

tom:

Great work on the mini. It's always satisfying to me to make a computer better. The key to being happy with this amazing older PowerPC hardware is to use it within it's means. The people who pee on PowerPC around here are trying to use 5+ year old computers for modern high demand needs.

Some are even sensless enough to equate a computers capability to how well it plays youtube videos. Sad I know..

I had a 1.25 mini myself for a little over a year and found it to be a great machine. I sold it to buy a G4 MDD.