Leopards Baseline Requirments re-revisited

I'm running it on a 1.25GHz iMac G4 with 768mb of RAM and it flies!

Lil Chillbil said:

Where do you draw the line of leopards baseline specs, some people say it won't even run well on a fully loaded imac g4 1.25ghz and max ram with a ssd. While other like zen.state say that you can get decent performance from a sawtooth 400mhz g4 with 1 gig of ram.

I personaly draw the line of leopard at 700mhz and 1 gig of ram=decent performance

so where do you guys draw the line ?

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I agree with your assessment, as long as you are running a decent video card. I have leo running on a 733Mhz, 1GB RAM & 64MB vid card.

I'm going to be running leopard on a 400MHz sawtooth with 1.5GB Ram And with the original rage 128 pro as my every day mac someday i will upgrade the video card to a geforce 6200. i'm just waiting for the mac to come in the mail

Running it fine with 512MB of RAM in my 1.8 GHz Power Mac G5.

Have run it on an 800mhz TiBook w/ 1gb RAM & the mobility radeon 7500 (32mb) in the past with no problems speed or graphics wise.

IMO you could run Leopard on a any old PowerMac G4 as long as it has 1gb RAM & a decent'ish GPU.

it's on my 1.33Ghz 1.25GB 12" PowerBook. I liked Tiger better.

Link

MAC MAN JW said:

leopard on a 400MHz sawtooth with 1.5GB Ram And with the original rage 128 pro

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Leopard doesn't install any video drivers for rage 128 cards.
The drivers from Tiger can be used. Link

The biggest issue I have with Tiger is problematic networking support. Since I utilize many network resources, Leo is simple better.

In all honestly, i still think Tiger is the way to go for PowerPC Macs, all of them. Although Leopard runs, there's just somthing about it that doesn't feel right when on PPC.

Plus you can still do everything in Tiger anyway

SimonUK5 said:

In all honestly, i still think Tiger is the way to go for PowerPC Macs, all of them. Although Leopard runs, there's just somthing about it that doesn't feel right when on PPC.

Plus you can still do everything in Tiger anyway

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No way would I ever use Tiger on my G5. I have Tiger on the iMac G4, but unlike what you think, there are some apps I use that only work under Leopard.

It's impossible to determine baseline requirements that would work for all.
Every single user has their own definition of "fluent", "flying", "acceptable", "useable" etc.

Some of my personal experiences with 10.5 on:
– 700 MHz iMac G4, 1GB RAM (CI not capable GPU) - unacceptably slow.
– 1.67 GHz PB, 2GB RAM (CI capable GPU) – useable but still much slower than 10.4
– 2.0 GHz iMac G5, 1.8 PM G5, both 2GB RAM (CI capable GPU) – useable but still much slower than 10.4
– 2.3 GHz PM G5 3GB RAM (DC and DP, CI capable GPU) – this was the "break point" for me – no noticeable difference between 10.5 and 10.4 in terms of speed and overall snappiness
– Mac Pro 1.1, 8GB RAM – 10.5 much faster than 10.4

IMO: 2GB RAM and CI capable card - any G4+ computer should be useable under 10.5
Sometimes running newer versions of our favorite apps is worth some speed penalty.

I put my minimum at 700Mhz, 512MB ram, and a NVIDIA GeForce2 MX. Of course stock Leopard isn't very fast on that, but my highly customized version runs well enough for me. I do remember trying it on a 450Mhz G4. Did not like waiting for things to happen.

I will admit that i have never tried to slim Leopard down or anything.

Try PowerPC only leopard.

PowerPCMacMan said:

Try PowerPC only leopard.

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I remember trying that on my Cube when it first showed up. Found it to be slower than my already highly slimmed and optimized version of Leopard.

Intell said:

I remember trying that on my Cube when it first showed up. Found it to be slower than my already highly slimmed and optimized version of Leopard.

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Fancy writing a tutorial or guide of some sort? I'm sure everyone here would benefit greatly from it.

I'll try, but be warned, it's been a long time since I did what I did to my Leopard systems. Now days I just CCC over my standard image onto any Mac that needs Leopard. Sadly, my Leopard build won't ever be as good as my Tiger build. My Tiger build has a starting ram usage of 70 megabytes when starting from a cold boot. Leopard's is a bit higher than that.

I've run Leopard on three of my machines... I'll just give a little summary of how it ran on each of them. (Long post incoming, whoa. Didn't think it'd get this large.)

- 2003 Power Mac G4 MDD (FW800), dual 1.25ghz model with a 64MB Radeon 9000 Pro driving a 1920x1080 display - 512MB to 1GB of RAM
Leopard... runs pretty nicely on this thing, even sans CoreImage support from the video card. Nothing really felt sluggish, I could do pretty much everything I'd asked from this machine at the time. I get the feeling Leopard shines at its best on dual core/dual CPU machines. There was the occasional beachball, but it didn't last very long when it did happen. Certainly felt like a step up over Tiger on this machine.

Things did perform even better than before when I upped the RAM to 1GB, however! The occasional beachball vanished, really, and things didn't feel like they were choking in the least.

I've since actually upgraded this machine to 2GB of RAM, after a lucky flea market purchase in which I obtained compatible RAM. I haven't used the machine since, though as it's (kinda depressingly) been taken over by my custom desktop build. (Which, for the record, I've had longer than the G4... the G4 seriously outclassed it at one point but a processor upgrade brought the desktop up to speed. But enough on that.)

I think Tiger may have run a tad bit better on this machine, but let's be honest here: this machine was powerful enough for Leopard not to feel sluggish in any way, and it was a joy to use for the while it spent as my main machine. I'd like to put a better video card in at SOME point, but the prices are pretty ridiculous for something that isn't a daily driver anymore.

- 2004 Power Mac G5, dual 1.8ghz model with a 128MB Radeon 9600XT driving that same 1920x1080 display - 2GB of RAM
Leopard just runs beautifully on G5s. Honestly, the G5s with CI-capable video cards really have no issues with Leopard and more recent software from what I've seen. I was able to play 720 and 1080p video no problem, from my recollection, and there was really never any performance issue (even with Flash, to my memory - the mind boggles at this one)

I never really got to push this machine too hard. It replaced my custom PC as a primary machine for, oh, about a week or two. The only reason I actually stopped using it was because I worried about power usage, as I hear the G5s have ridiculously high power usage. (To the point where I'd probably force OS X 10.6 or 10.8 onto my desktop if I needed OS X on a desktop and my G4 wouldn't suffice, admittedly, but eh.) If these fears are completely unfounded, I'd like to know... it was a pretty great machine, and I do miss using it.

Well, save for bizarre video issues that really only served as more of an annoyance than something absolutely insane, but eh.
(By the way, the screenshots in said topic have relocated: 1 2)

- 2005 iBook G4, 12" 1.33ghz model with a 32MB Radeon Mobility 9550, driving its built-in 1024x768 display - 1.5GB of RAM
This is the oddball. Leopard ranges from "fairly usable but it feels slower" to "oh DEAR GOD let me back to Tiger". It was almost painful to use until I performed a recent reinstall and tried most everything people suggest to squeeze more out of the machine. Now it's... acceptable, reasonably. Better for web browsing, as I've had better experiences with Aurora than TenFourFox as of late, but aside from that I don't know. Video plays in VLC, but I fear that it may be a bit much for the iBook for some reason. (This is a standard 640x480 rip, too, with deinterlacing enabled. Runs kinda poorly on the iBook, when it's not plugged in... which is the whole point of playing video on that laptop for me.) To be fair, though, I do still have the stock 40GB HDD in there (among something else I had thought of but have frustratingly forgotten, but I'll post it here when I remember)... would replacing the drive have that large a boost on performance? I'm wary of opening the iBook, but I'd try it if I really had to...

Overall, I'd stick to Tiger on the iBook... except, well, VLC 0.9 seems to lack the deinterlace option. I don't know, perhaps I'm just missing something obvious that would make 10.4 perfect on this one. I don't know whether it's the weaker GPU or the single CPU that makes this one feel so much more sluggish in the UI department, either, but that would be tolerable if not for the general sluggishness everywhere else.

I don't think I've had enough experience with PPC machines to really be able to say what runs best on what, I'll be honest... but I do get the feeling that it's far better suited toward the higher-end G4s (Power Mac, maaaybe PowerBook) than the lower end ones, and if you're on a G5 you should almost always be good.

Also, yikes. Sorry this was a wall of text, again. I don't usually do that.