Indecision on which one.

[torvan]

Okay, I have these three Macs. For regular everyday use and an occasional Photoshop CS2 file (very occasional) along with some gaming, which one should I make the regular machine?:

1. Quicksilver 2002 1.0Ghz Dual, 1.5GB RAM, Ti4600 128MB. Currently with OS 9.2.2 on a separate partition than 10.5.8. but both on a 500GB SATA SSD connected with a Startech SATA to IDE converter.

2. Mirror Door Drive, June 2002. 1.25Ghz Single, 2GB RAM, TI4600 128MB. Currently has OS 9.2.2 on one SSD (1GB), 10.5.8 on one SSD (1 GB), both connected to a Sonnet Tempo SATA controller. A third drive being a "Data only" is a 2 GB IDE drive.

3. Mirror Door Drive, June 2002. 1.0 Ghz Dual Processor. 2GB RAM, TI 4600 128MB. No OS installed, no drives yet installed. Still being cleaned up, but once ready would steal the drives from one of the other machines.

Now I am aware I will hear from some of you to get an upgrade on the processors, but that is not in my tech budget for a while. Some will say buy a MDD Dual 1.25 and run the OS9Lives installer on it along with Leopard. Again, not in my tech budget to get yet another G4 machine.

I am instead looking at what I do have and wonder which I should put into daily G4 use and wonder your thoughts/opinions were.

 

[1042686]

I’d put the Sonnet tempo into #3 & use that. That or the Quicksilver for an immediate solution.

 

[velocityg4]

For a daily driver. I'd say #3 with a good PowerPC linux distro installed. So, you can run a modern web browser and other modern software. You've got two other machines to play around with old versions of OS X and OS 9. Heck, you could also play around with a PowerPC BSD distro, Amiga OS and BeOS. Not that there is much of a community developing for Amiga OS and BeOS.

 

[G4fanboy]

Torvan,is the noise from machines a thing to be considered?

The QS is more silent than the MDDs

The QS is only a little slower than the dual GHz on the MDD due to the 166 MHz bus on the MDD vs the 133 on the QS.

Single 1.25 should be slower than dual GHz for most things, but some MacOS9 apps could prefer a quicker single than a dual.

CS2 on dual should fly

I have the QS dual GHz cpu on a Digital Audio machine with a 12cm fan hooked to the heatsink and is almost silent.

 

[AphoticD]

I’ve never owned an MDD, but if it gets as noisy as people say then I would forgo the higher specs of the MDD for the Quicksilver as a daily driver - I like the silent operators.

Either of the dual G4s running with SSDs should give great performance and they both have L3 cache I believe. You probably won’t notice the difference between 1.5 and 2GB of RAM for most purposes either.

The single 1.25 might be best relegated to OS9 use when needed due to the spinner.

 

[1042686]

I’ve never owned an MDD, but if it gets as noisy as people say then I would forgo the higher specs of the MDD for the Quicksilver as a daily driver - I like the silent operators.

Either of the dual G4s running with SSDs should give great performance and they both have L3 cache I believe. You probably won’t notice the difference between 1.5 and 2GB of RAM for most purposes either.

The single 1.25 might be best relegated to OS9 use when needed due to the spinner.

A QS is by no means a silent powermac. It IMO is just as wind tunnel-ly as the MDD . Every other week or so I power up and daily my dual 1Ghz Quicksilver. It is a fine machine still for average tasks and basic browsing. Between my dual 1Ghz QS with its 1.5Gb of pc133 SDRAM and my dual 800mhz MDD with 2gb pc2700 DDR @ 333Mhz, I think they are pretty similar in real world user experience. My MDD has a SSD in it (via pata/sata adapter, not a sonnet PCI card or other overly pricey wizardry) and as such does nudge the QS out in responsiveness a tiny bit, but overall the QS is a fine machine and with a SSD in it would be just as snappy in most DD applications I think and as-is, is not slow by any means.

Both are great boxes of the era, so either way you go I don't see how you could be disappointed. Both can boot OS9 if you need it and is absolutely great with the os9lives build. IME as far as OSX goes, leopard is certainly the sweet spot for apps with a modern feel and both machines spec'd out how you have them will drive 10.5.8 really well.

Linux distros on PPC are not my personal jam, so I'm not a good judge of its potential on PowerPC if that is your thing or a point of interest you are looking to pursue but lotsa folks on here do enjoy a number of PPC distros as are evidenced by the wiki and many threads on here and can certainly be achieved if so desired.

Best of luck to you.

 

[z970]

my dual 800mhz MDD with 2gb pc2700 DDR @ 333Mhz

Quick question, how did you get an 800 MHz DP MDD? I thought they only went as low as 867?

 

[1042686]

Quick question, how did you get an 800 MHz DP MDD? I thought they only went as low as 867?

Ok dug this guy out of the closet and you are indeed correct.

It is a dual 867mhz.

I must have too many macs. Is there such a thing?

On a side note, since I have both machines running at the same time, I did some real world touchy feely tests and the MDD does indeed feel just a bit snappier between apps and even rendering websites. As both my MDD and QS have the same GPU (64mb ATI radeon 9000 Pro) I attribute that mostly to the SSD in the MDD and not so much the 333mhz DDR vs 133mhz SDRAM. There's the bus speed improvements between models but if memory serves me correctly, I was underwhelmed the first time I A/Bd the MDD against the QS expecting more performance boost than was actually experienced. The noticeable jump happened with the upgrade to SSD. Regardless, both machines still do incredibly well on the internet of 2020 and are the best modern internet experiences out of my PMG4s.

 

[reukiodo]

I agree with most of the suggestions above:
MacOS X on QS
MacOS 9 on single 1.25 MDD
debian linux on dual 1 MDD as daily driver

There really isn't much reason to dual-boot any machine when you have many. MacOS 9 makes little to no use of dual CPUs, so the single fast CPU will give it the best benefit. Between the dual MDD and dual QS, the dual MDD will be faster because of the bus, all other things equal, so I would suggest making that your daily driver. The reason I would recommend linux on your daily driver is for modern up-to-date software, but if you prefer MacOS X over linux as your main OS, then you can just swap the OS recommendations of the two (linux on QS, MacOS X on MDD).