Boosting performance on a G5 PowerMac?

Max out the RAM, 8GB. Buy a pair of WD blacks and RAID 0.

Those are the two easy things to do. It's an old computer and that really does limit your options

 

Put a SSD there. It will fly.

 

Increasing the RAM from 2gb to 4gb will make a big difference, so definitely do that.

Also, SSD hard drives are dropping in price and you can pick up a 60gb SSD for well under $100 now, sometimes as low as $75 or so. You could install that, clone your existing drive to it, then use the SSD as your main drive and the 80gb as an extra storage drive. The difference in speed between an SSD and any other hard drive is insane. It will feel like you have a new computer.

Have you also tried running OnyX on it? It will clean out temporary files and do a few other things, and if it's never been run on your Mac it will speed things up a bit, especially shutting down and booting. (run everything under each tab of the Cleaning section, and then run the Automation section, and reboot - I do this about once a month on all my Macs and it helps)

But if you are on a budget and hope to get another 2+ years out of your Mac, increasing the RAM and adding an SSD drive would be a gigantic improvement.

 

what apps do you use?

 

SSD and ram, in that order, will greatly improve performance.

 

Only 2 gigs of RAM? Good lord, your G5 is crippled. Give it as much RAM as you can afford. My dual core 2.0 has 8 gigs and gives my C2D MacBook a run for it's money. Actually, I do all my heavy lifting on the G5.

 

I agree, adding more RAM makes a difference, I am now at 8.5 Gigs and looking to add more to mac out 16 Gigs. My dual core 2.3GHz G5 feels and behave like a new machine, well I have an SSD there too as a boot drive.

 

Unless you are running out of RAM, i don't think you will see much improvement by upgrading to 4gb. For example, most of the tasks you listed appear to be CPU bound, as I doubt opening and scrolling around a PDF file is going to use up all that much ram.

I would run activity monitor during your daily workload and watch the ram usage. If you see lots and lots of red and yellow eating up the pie chart during the day, and little to no blue and green, then you may benefit from more ram, especially if the slowdown occurs when you are low on free ram.

 

That powermac G5 is a really fast computer. I wish if I had one!
The G5 is only a few years old. Still an awesome computer.
To make your powermac even faster


Hardware:
1. Get new hard drive 7200rpm+ 500GB+
2. Add as many fans you can even if it mean drilling the case
3. Add as much RAM as possible
4. Get a better GPU


Software:

1. Store all your data (Not apps!) on a 2nd Hard drive. Your computer will run better the more room you have in your main hard drive

2. Download a program called "OnyX" and run through everything.


If you do this it should be super fast.

 

^^^^^^^^ Adding more fans? Are you seriously suggesting wasting a perfectly good computer case and adding more fans will be any good, because the G5 is optimized with the number of fans it has, and the fans are probably far higher quality than any replacement fans (server grade Delta fans, Dell actually uses them too, or has, impressively enough). But yeah, that wouldn't help at all bro

Like others have noted -


GET AN SSD for a boot drive and I'd even put some of the main apps on it, man I'd pay to see how a G5 would work w/ an SSD, probably be epic.

Max the RAM

Get better Video Card (didn't read what you had already), but you can buy flashed PC video cards which I'd say is the way to go instead of bending over backwards buying the Mac-only versions price-wise.

That's really all that can be done I do believe.

 

I can tell, not that epic as in "EPIC". I have an SSD as a boot drive on my DC PM G5. It is still limited with the SATA I speed on the PMG5. But it is a huge improvement from a rotating disk.

 

Ofcourse, SSD's in RAID0 - that would probably be epic as in "EPIC", at least relative to a spinning disk

 

Fans will improve your performance. I have had experience that they make the computer smoother and somewhat faster. I did tests on Sibelius 6, Logic pro 8 and safari. Everything was smoother. Arctic cooling, antec and thermaltake and great fans. A case is only a case.

 

Sorry, but this is nonsense. The G5 is carefully configured into thermal zones, with separate sensors to control fan speeds. Randomly adding more fans is a waste of time and money, and could actually hurt heat dissipation performance by ruining correct air flow.

Better to clean the inside of the case totally of dust, to ensure the cooling system is working as efficiently as possible.

 

The best way to increase airflow is by modifying the AppleFan.kext file.

Stock code has it set to start to spool up up at 135*f and max them out at 144*f with very small even speed steps between and a very long delay before they spool down.

I modified the code to spool up gradually 129*f-163* then ramp up to max quickly between 165*f-167*f. Slowdown delay was cut by 2/3 from 48 to 16.

Code:

<key>fan-hysteresis-temp</key>
				<integer>13300</integer>
				<key>fan-polling-period</key>
				<integer>8</integer>
				<key>fan-slowdown-delay</key>
				<integer>16</integer>
				<key>fan-speed-table</key>
				<array>
					<integer>13800</integer>
					<integer>14200</integer>
					<integer>14600</integer>
					<integer>15000</integer>
					<integer>15500</integer>
					<integer>16000</integer>
					<integer>15500</integer>
					<integer>16768</integer>
					<integer>17200</integer>
					<integer>17800</integer>
					<integer>18176</integer>
					<integer>18700</integer>
					<integer>18950</integer>
					<integer>19100</integer>
					<integer>19150</integer>
					<integer>19200</integer>
				</array>
				<key>fan-speedup-delay</key>
				<integer>8</integer>

FYI, heat has ZERO impact on processor performance. It works the same at 20*f as it does at 195*f. So, yes, what MM said is absolute nonsense.