Does Leopard On a Quad Need Optimizing?

[SuperKerem]

Hi, as some may know I have a G5 Quad. It is running stock Leopard and I am wondering is if there is a way of improving performance without sacrificing too much of the visual effects? (Under-the-hood sort of stuff)

Since I am using the stock 10 year old hard drive at the moment, would installing a cheap SSD make a huge impact in the general responsiveness of the UI? It doesn't seem slow, but I'm just curious!

 

[eyoungren]

An SSD would improved performance, yes. As to need to optimize, not really. I would just for the sake of getting the most out of it that I could, but with a Quad there's really no need.

 

[jbarley]

Hi, as some may know I have a G5 Quad. It is running stock Leopard and I am wondering is if there is a way of improving performance without sacrificing too much of the visual effects? (Under-the-hood sort of stuff)

Since I am using the stock 10 year old hard drive at the moment, would installing a cheap SSD make a huge impact in the general responsiveness of the UI? It doesn't seem slow, but I'm just curious!

I have a Quad, and like all my PPC systems I chose to go the SSD route.
I've never had any problems using SATA II drives, but never had any luck getting a SATA III unit to work, my systems do not recognize the drive being there.
Maybe some other brands might work though!
Also, SATA II SSDs are getting hard to find, so with this mind I stocked up some time ago.

 

[Surrat]

I have a Quad, and like all my PPC systems I chose to go the SSD route.
I've never had any problems using SATA II drives, but never had any luck getting a SATA III unit to work, my systems do not recognize the drive being there.
Maybe some other brands might work though!
Also, SATA II SSDs are getting hard to find, so with this mind I stocked up some time ago.

I had a intel 510 series ssd, which is sata3, in my quad working fine. However, it only worked in the lower drive bay. Anytime your trying a sata3 ssd, make sure to test both bays.

 

[jbarley]

I had a intel 510 series ssd, which is sata3, in my quad working fine. However, it only worked in the lower drive bay. Anytime your trying a sata3 ssd, make sure to test both bays.

Point taken,
the SATA III SSD I tried was a crucial and I did try both bays to no avail.

 

[bunnspecial]

I'm going to go against the curve a bit and just mention that having 3.5" SATA bays opens up the world to a whole lot of really great, large, new production platter drives. Although SSDs will always hold the edge in speed, platter technology hasn't stagnated just yet and high-end platter drives(i.e. WD Blue and Black series) turn out some really impressive speed numbers for a platter drive.

I forget what the bus speed is on G5s, but I don't think it's the full 1.5gb/s of SATA I(someone please correct me if I'm wrong).

I've put SSDs in a lot of PPC Macs, but the times I've experimented with them in PPC Macs I've been left somewhat less than impressed. I should probably go back and experiment, but so far I've been more than happy with the pair of 1TB WD Blacks in RAID 0 in home G5(single 1.8). I've been afraid to try RAID 0 on my Quad(which I use for work), although admittedly I'd probably be okay on it since I keep an external 2TB backup connected all the time.

 

[Altemose]

I would go for an affordable SATA II SSD or high performance 7200 RPM hard drive. To improve UI performance, I highly recommend disabling BeamSync if you use an LCD as well as enabling QuartzGL if your GPU supports it.

 

[zackkmac]

A couple of things I do to any of my Leopard machines to help tweak them under the hood:

1. Download and run XSlimmer - it takes out Intel coding in any application and that'll help programs respond quicker while also reducing size. I believe Safari went down from almost 300MB to 23MB when it was done. With the stock OS X apps alone I think it shaved off somewhere around 700MB.

2. Disable Dashboard - very easy 2-step Terminal process you can find via Google

3. I always max the RAM and install the best hard drive the computer can utilize. For my purposes, since my PowerBooks/iBooks only have ATA, a 7200RPM drive does the job just fine because I don't think they would benefit enough from an SSD to justify that price. Your G5 would be a different story though - it would be a great improvement.

 

[Hrududu]

Leopard runs great on dual and quad G5s. I would start with hardware upgrades before messing around with "trimming" down the software. Fast hard drives with lots of cache make a huge difference. Higher end video cards can make things better too. My quad has 12GB of RAM, 7200 RPM drives, and Radeon X1900 and its running great. That said, I have a dual 2.0 G5 with 4GB, 7200 RPM drives, and Radeon 9600 and it feels great too. The G5 can handle Leopard just fine.

 

[bunnspecial]

Leopard runs great on dual and quad G5s. I would start with hardware upgrades before messing around with "trimming" down the software. Fast hard drives with lots of cache make a huge difference. Higher end video cards can make things better too. My quad has 12GB of RAM, 7200 RPM drives, and Radeon X1900 and its running great. That said, I have a dual 2.0 G5 with 4GB, 7200 RPM drives, and Radeon 9600 and it feels great too. The G5 can handle Leopard just fine.

My Single 1.8/6gb/GEForce 6800 Ultra handles Leopard great also.

My Quad with 10gb and a 7800 does even better.

 

[eyoungren]

The stock 1.8Ghz single G5 (4GB ram) at work has been handling everything thrown at it since February 2005. Panther and Leopard are the best systems it's had with Leopard being hands down the winner.

Never had any issues with it that weren't a defect or something stupid I did.

 

[MagicBoy]

I forget what the bus speed is on G5s, but I don't think it's the full 1.5gb/s of SATA I(someone please correct me if I'm wrong).

Northbridge link is a HyperTransport link run at half CPU speed, one to each physical socket. Northbridge(Memory and Graphics) and SouthBridge (IO devices inc the SATA) have a 1.6GBps HyperTransport link.

I've got a spare 40GB Intel 320 SSD, Tempted to fling it in my 2.0 DP and see how it runs.

 

[val1984]

I've got a spare 40GB Intel 320 SSD, Tempted to fling it in my 2.0 DP and see how it runs.

I have put a 180 GB Intel 320 SSD in mine and it's working great