PowerBook G4 12' questions

[AtaruBarreau]

Hi everyone! For the past couple of months, I've been using a PowerBook G4 12' 1,33Ghz, with OG 60Gig HDD & upgraded 1,25Gig of RAM. It's been working near perfectly, with the help of G4FanControl, except a few things:
1. The hard-drive has a SMART State error, and basically works fine except that sometimes when installing games or copying large files it starts to make grinding noises: in short, it's going to fail in the next couple of months for sure.
2. Because of the fact that I use a Wifi-Dongle for the internet (can't use the AirPort Extreme for my dorm's Wifi as it disconnects too often) & probably that my place is a bit warmer than my parents house, the GPU gets warm very easily (around 55°C less or more depending on the load, and 65°C or even more for both CPU & GPU every time I do something intensive, like UT 2004). I know these temps are almost normal, but I'm kinda nervous about still have the old thermal paste and thermal pads inside.
3. The disc drive is toasted (the previous owner didn't told me about it), and I need to liberate a DVD that spins every time I wake the computer.

So I bought myslef a Lindy IDE to MSATA adapter, a Kingston 120gig MSATA SDD, 2mm thermal pads & thermal paste (I've learned everything from this great and detailed thread.), and currently waiting for the stuff to arrive.
In the mean time, I have a few questions I'd like to ask you guys:
1. Having read that the MSATA drive produces more heat than the traditional HDD, I was wondering if there was down sides to the use of MSATA SDD in those small-&-crammed-up PowerBook?
2. I don't plan on installing a new disc drive (actually, I might buy a Firewire DVD-Record drive one day if I really need it), does leaving the space it occupied before free make the airflow & heat dissipation better?
3. I plan on installing 10.2 & 10.5 (10.2 for its Classic abilities, and 10.5 for the better compatibility than Tiger with most internet related stuff.). Have you seen real improvements using the Aurora tools in Leopard? I'm worried about Leopard making the machine too hot (currently using Tiger and on light workloads, the computer stays quiet and cool).
4. And lastly, are there other upgrades & future-proofing things I should be aware of? I want to keep this computer as my main portable one for as long as possible.

Thanks for reading this !

 

[Dronecatcher]

3. I plan on installing 10.2 & 10.5 (10.2 for its Classic abilities, and 10.5 for the better compatibility than Tiger with most internet related stuff.). Have you seen real improvements using the Aurora tools in Leopard? I'm worried about Leopard making the machine too hot (currently using Tiger and on light workloads, the computer stays quiet and cool).

I have the same model and Leopard always runs the machine hotter than Tiger - if you must run Leopard, install Onyx and turn off all the eye candy and run ShadowKiller - this will ease the GPU's work by a fraction.

 

[AtaruBarreau]

I have the same model and Leopard always runs the machine hotter than Tiger - if you must run Leopard, install Onyx and turn off all the eye candy and run ShadowKiller - this will ease the GPU's work by a fraction.

I might do that; I had TenFourFox being way more responsive on Leopard on my MDD; but now I don't know anymore, I might stay on Tiger. Thinking about it, I don't really know what I needed Leopard for anymore aha

 

[Dronecatcher]

I might do that; I had TenFourFox being way more responsive on Leopard on my MDD; but now I don't know anymore, I might stay on Tiger. Thinking about it, I don't really know what I needed Leopard for anymore aha

I'd rather use Leopard but it just makes my Powerbook 12" wheeze...no such issues on my iBook 12"

 

[AphoticD]

I hardly run Leopard on my PB12” these days. Tiger does a great job!

I did some extensive CI tests in Xcode and found the faux Core Image hardware acceleration provided by the FX 5200 (both the Mobile “Go” and G5 Desktop series) actually hit up the CPU during Core Image calls instead of allowing the GPU to handle the processing.

I was digging through the Core Image framework headers and found the FX5200 series were explicitly set to offload CI rendering to the CPU by design... when calling a GL surface you can programmatically override to send processing to the GPU on an FX 5200 series system, but I found it to be glitchy AND slow.

This discovery makes it no surprise Apple got away with pretending the FX 5200 series were worthy of “Pro” level systems by quietly deactivating it behind the scenes and allowing the G4/G5 to flex its AltiVec muscle to make up for it.

All this essentially means Leopard will carry a heavier CPU load than Tiger on an FX 5200 system because the OS constantly makes calls upon Core Image for things like the 3D Dock. Whereas Tiger used QE primarily and only introduced CI sparingly for eyecandy like the Dashboard ripple effect.

 

[Amethyst1]

3. I plan on installing 10.2 & 10.5 (10.2 for its Classic abilities, and 10.5 for the better compatibility than Tiger with most internet related stuff.).

The 1.33 GHz 12" PowerBook shipped with and officially requires at least 10.3.3 but will run 10.2.8 just fine -- I am doing it on mine. However, for 10.2 to boot, it must be updated to 10.2.8 first so you will need to carry out and update the installation on another machine that is officially supported by 10.2 and subsequently transfer the installed OS to the 12".

 

[AtaruBarreau]

Ok! Very interesting! I didn't knew that!

 

[z970]

Having read that the MSATA drive produces more heat than the traditional HDD, I was wondering if there was down sides to the use of MSATA SDD in those small-&-crammed-up PowerBook?

Having used a couple in three 'Books, I can tell you they eat less power, and I haven't noticed extra heat from them. The 100gb 5200rpm HD that came with my PowerBook G4 12" was most certainly hotter (sometimes you would almost think there was a CPU under there). As for the 40gb 4200rpm HD in my iBook G4, I believe that ran slightly cooler than the mSATA, and I haven't seen any unusual temperatures with one being in my DLSD.

All in all, your temperature comparisons may vary, and there aren't really any down sides considering the massive speed jump gained.

Have you seen real improvements using the Aurora tools in Leopard?

There will be an obvious improvement from a stock install. In both AuroraTrim and AquaTrim, noteworthy removed components are AudioIPCDriver.kext (this is a useless kext as far as we know and only serves to idly eat cycles), all modem and serial port kexts (theoretically, this should exhibit a slight improvement on memory bandwidth), non-essential fonts (this presents a very noticeable difference in application launch times, particularly TenFourFox), and largely redundant frameworks, which is supposed to have a very slight effect on CPU performance. Plus, you get to save several hundred megabytes worth of junk from your system, which means they're good for small drives too.

The accompanying accelerator script for Tiger disables BeamSync, which slightly improves graphical smoothness, and AuroraAccelerator goes several steps further and enables a couple of advanced graphics technologies to offload even more to the GPU so graphic performance is even smoother and faster.

That's all, off the top of my head...

Make sure to supplement with PowerUOC. You never would have thought TenFourFox could go so fast.

 

[Project Alice]

I hardly run Leopard on my PB12” these days. Tiger does a great job!

I did some extensive CI tests in Xcode and found the faux Core Image hardware acceleration provided by the FX 5200 (both the Mobile “Go” and G5 Desktop series) actually hit up the CPU during Core Image calls instead of allowing the GPU to handle the processing.

I was digging through the Core Image framework headers and found the FX5200 series were explicitly set to offload CI rendering to the CPU by design... when calling a GL surface you can programmatically override to send processing to the GPU on an FX 5200 series system, but I found it to be glitchy AND slow.

This discovery makes it no surprise Apple got away with pretending the FX 5200 series were worthy of “Pro” level systems by quietly deactivating it behind the scenes and allowing the G4/G5 to flex its AltiVec muscle to make up for it.

All this essentially means Leopard will carry a heavier CPU load than Tiger on an FX 5200 system because the OS constantly makes calls upon Core Image for things like the 3D Dock. Whereas Tiger used QE primarily and only introduced CI sparingly for eyecandy like the Dashboard ripple effect.

This explains quite a bit, thank you! I'm curious if a similar thing is done on PCs to allow Windows Aero to function on the 5200...
I don't even Tiger installed on my main 12" (1.5Ghz) but I may boot it up with my FW drive and play around with it a bit.