Should I put Leopard back on my Sawtooth?

[MacFoxG4]

Hello,

I stumbled across this sub-forum and I decided to join because of my interest in PowerPC Macs. I have a Power Mac G4 Sawtooth (AGP Graphics) that came with Leopard installed when I bought it off ebay about a year or so ago. The specs it had when I bought it were as follows:

1.5 ghz CPU upgrade
2 HDDs
DVD-ROM drive
1 GB of RAM
Rage 128 Pro with 16 MB of VRAM

Leopard ran okay on this Mac, but a couple of programs had issues. The DVD player refused to run because the Rage 128 doesn't support core image and iWork '09 would install but not run even when I upgraded to a Radeon 7500 with 32 MB of VRAM. I downgraded to Tiger and iWork '09 runs just fine. Since I've owned this Mac, I've upgraded the RAM to 2 GB, added USB 2.0 and gigabit Ethernet cards, and upgraded the graphics to a Radeon 9000 with 128 MB of VRAM. I kind of miss Leopard, so I was thinking of putting it back on my G4 as part of a triple-boot setup with Tiger and OS 9.

Would iWork '09 finally be able to run on Leopard with these specs? Are there any DVD player alternatives for Leopard that don't require a core image capable graphics card? The 9000 doesn't support core image, but it does support Quartz extreme.

If this setup isn't enough to run Leopard properly, which power mac would you recommend as a good machine for running Leopard?

If my machine is good enough for Leopard, what is the best way to achieve a triple boot setup? Currently, I have Tiger on one HDD and OS 9 on the other. Should I buy a third HDD or should I re-partition the HDD that has Tiger and have both Tiger and Leopard on the same drive, but with their own partitions?

Thanks in advance.

 

[AphoticD]

Your upgraded Sawtooth sounds like a beast!

I flashed a PC 128MB Radeon 9700 in my Sawtooth using Graphiccellerator (http://thomas.perrier.name/graphiccelerator.html)

It runs Leopard beautifully with 1.5GB of RAM and has full Core Image support - all apps and games I’ve thrown at it work as expected.

I upgraded the original 350MHz 7400 CPU to a 700MHz 7455 (or is 7450?) with 256KB L2 + 1MB L3 cache originally from a DA 733Mhz.

You can read all about my Sawtooth adventures here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/my-powermac-g4-lucky-dip-twins.2070101/

Oh and I got a 3rd Sawtooth earlier this year (for free). This one has a logic board which support Dual Processors (unlike my earlier two). So I’m on the hunt to deck this one out with some DP goodness!
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If my machine is good enough for Leopard, what is the best way to achieve a triple boot setup? Currently, I have Tiger on one HDD and OS 9 on the other. Should I buy a third HDD or should I re-partition the HDD that has Tiger and have both Tiger and Leopard on the same drive, but with their own partitions?

I would normally just partition the same HDD.

My usual setup is something like:
10 - 20GB for Tiger
< 10GB for OS 9
And the rest for Leopard.

But that depends on your HDD capacity.

You can try to use Leopard’s Disk Utility to repartition without erasing, but I have had mixed results and usually just backup, wipe, reinstall and manually restore apps and data.

 

[Slix]

I wonder why iWork '09 won't work on that machine with Leopard. I've run it on Tiger on iMac G3s with 400 MHz before. 🤔

Anyway, the upgrade sounds like a beast, for sure! Let us know your results.

 

[swamprock]

Your upgraded Sawtooth sounds like a beast!

I flashed a PC 128MB Radeon 9700 in my Sawtooth using Graphiccellerator (http://thomas.perrier.name/graphiccelerator.html)

It runs Leopard beautifully with 1.5GB of RAM and has full Core Image support - all apps and games I’ve thrown at it work as expected.

I upgraded the original 350MHz 7400 CPU to a 700MHz 7455 with 256KB L2 + 1MB L3 cache originally from a DA 733Mhz.

You can read all about my Sawtooth adventures here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/my-powermac-g4-lucky-dip-twins.2070101/

Oh and I got a 3rd Sawtooth earlier this year (for free). This one has a logic board which support Dual Processors (unlike my earlier two). So I’m on the hunt to deck this one out with some DP goodness!
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I would normally just partition the same HDD.

My usual setup is something like:
10 - 20GB for Tiger
< 10GB for OS 9
And the rest for Leopard.

But that depends on your HDD capacity.

You can try to use Leopard’s Disk Utility to repartition without erasing, but I have had mixed results and usually just backup, wipe, reinstall and manually restore apps and data.

I need to find a Mystic main board for my Sawtooth. I decided to leave my Cube pretty much stock (except for the GeForce 3), so I’ve got an extra dual 500mhz cpu board that needs a home. My Sawtooth can’t be upgraded with it.

 

[Raging Dufus]

I need to find a Mystic main board for my Sawtooth. I decided to leave my Cube pretty much stock (except for the GeForce 3), so I’ve got an extra dual 500mhz cpu board that needs a home. My Sawtooth can’t be upgraded with it.

Are you sure your Sawtooth can't take a dual CPU? The later revisions could, and there's a way to find out.

You can't just drop a Mystic main board into a Sawtooth. The power systems are incompatible, different PSU pinouts, greater wattage required for a Mystic, and the Mystic's AGP slot requires an extra 28V supply for ADC power. If you're not running an ADC display, you could adapt an ATX PSU to power the Mystic board. I suppose you could also change the pinouts of your Sawtooth PSU to match the Mystic's, but I personally wouldn't try that. Sawtooth PSU's were much weaker than the Mystic's, by something like 100 watts or so.

 

[swamprock]

Are you sure your Sawtooth can't take a dual CPU? The later revisions could, and there's a way to find out.

You can't just drop a Mystic main board into a Sawtooth. The power systems are incompatible, different PSU pinouts, greater wattage required for a Mystic, and the Mystic's AGP slot requires an extra 28V supply for ADC power. If you're not running an ADC display, you could adapt an ATX PSU to power the Mystic board. I suppose you could also change the pinouts of your Sawtooth PSU to match the Mystic's, but I personally wouldn't try that. Sawtooth PSU's were much weaker than the Mystic's, by something like 100 watts or so.

Yeah, I ran the Uni-North ASIC test, and it gave me a big fat NO.

Maybe I'll just hunt down a later revision Sawtooth board, as simple at THAT will be...

 

[Project Alice]

Hello,

I stumbled across this sub-forum and I decided to join because of my interest in PowerPC Macs. I have a Power Mac G4 Sawtooth (AGP Graphics) that came with Leopard installed when I bought it off ebay about a year or so ago. The specs it had when I bought it were as follows:

1.5 ghz CPU upgrade
2 HDDs
DVD-ROM drive
1 GB of RAM
Rage 128 Pro with 16 MB of VRAM

Leopard ran okay on this Mac, but a couple of programs had issues. The DVD player refused to run because the Rage 128 doesn't support core image and iWork '09 would install but not run even when I upgraded to a Radeon 7500 with 32 MB of VRAM. I downgraded to Tiger and iWork '09 runs just fine. Since I've owned this Mac, I've upgraded the RAM to 2 GB, added USB 2.0 and gigabit Ethernet cards, and upgraded the graphics to a Radeon 9000 with 128 MB of VRAM. I kind of miss Leopard, so I was thinking of putting it back on my G4 as part of a triple-boot setup with Tiger and OS 9.

Would iWork '09 finally be able to run on Leopard with these specs? Are there any DVD player alternatives for Leopard that don't require a core image capable graphics card? The 9000 doesn't support core image, but it does support Quartz extreme.

If this setup isn't enough to run Leopard properly, which power mac would you recommend as a good machine for running Leopard?

If my machine is good enough for Leopard, what is the best way to achieve a triple boot setup? Currently, I have Tiger on one HDD and OS 9 on the other. Should I buy a third HDD or should I re-partition the HDD that has Tiger and have both Tiger and Leopard on the same drive, but with their own partitions?

Thanks in advance.

I would absolutely install Leopard on it. One of my previous setups was a Sawtooth, with 2GB of ram, a SATA card, x4 SATA hard drives, a Geforce 6200, an Xserve G4 GigE NIC, and a dual 450Mhz CPU card. It ran Leopard like a dream. I later acquired a Mystic G4 and moved the same setup into it, only difference was I left the GigE card in the sawtooth for obvious reasons. And the Mystic already had a dual 500Mhz card in it. I loved using Leopard on that, too.
I just (literally yesterday) got a dual 1.42Ghz MDD and moved everything once again, into that only left out the Geforce which apperently doesn't work MDDs for some reason. Turns out it's PSU is flaky so I might end up putting it all back in my mystic for the time being.

Anyways, ignore the nay-sayers that say graphites are slow on leopard. You put a decent GPU in it and max out the ram, they run great. Since you've got a 1.5GHz CPU card, there's absolutely no reason why Leopard wouldn't fly on it.

Just don't even bother with that crappy Rage 128. The Rage 128 was obsolete by the time the Sawtooth was released, it's beyond me why apple contiued using it in literally every mac they made. Buy a Geforce 6200 and flash it; full core image and it works awesome.

Yeah, I ran the Uni-North ASIC test, and it gave me a big fat NO.

Maybe I'll just hunt down a later revision Sawtooth board, as simple at THAT will be...

I own like 5 or so graphite G4s, most of them are sawtooth's. I'm fairly certain that they are all a revision that takes dual CPUs. So it won't be hard. Just pick up the next sawtooth you see for sale, or go find an ewaste center. 85% of the time it'll be a later revision sawtooth.

 

[MacFoxG4]

After reading these posts, I bought a copy of Leopard off ebay. I'll post an update after I do the installation.

I would absolutely install Leopard on it. One of my previous setups was a Sawtooth, with 2GB of ram, a SATA card, x4 SATA hard drives, a Geforce 6200, an Xserve G4 GigE NIC, and a dual 450Mhz CPU card. It ran Leopard like a dream. I later acquired a Mystic G4 and moved the same setup into it, only difference was I left the GigE card in the sawtooth for obvious reasons. And the Mystic already had a dual 500Mhz card in it. I loved using Leopard on that, too.
I just (literally yesterday) got a dual 1.42Ghz MDD and moved everything once again, into that only left out the Geforce which apperently doesn't work MDDs for some reason. Turns out it's PSU is flaky so I might end up putting it all back in my mystic for the time being.

Anyways, ignore the nay-sayers that say graphites are slow on leopard. You put a decent GPU in it and max out the ram, they run great. Since you've got a 1.5GHz CPU card, there's absolutely no reason why Leopard wouldn't fly on it.

Just don't even bother with that crappy Rage 128. The Rage 128 was obsolete by the time the Sawtooth was released, it's beyond me why apple contiued using it in literally every mac they made. Buy a Geforce 6200 and flash it; full core image and it works awesome.

I considered the Geforce 6200 due to its support for core image and low power consumption. Unfortunately, all of the core image capable cards I have come across are rather limited under OS 9 (limited resolutions, no DVD playback, no acceleration). I have thought about making the Sawtooth OS X only and ditching OS 9 since I can run 9 on my other PPC macs. I do like having OS 9 on this mac though. I ended up picking the Radeon 9000 because it has 128 MB of VRAM and it is fully functional under OS 9.

I wonder why iWork '09 won't work on that machine with Leopard. I've run it on Tiger on iMac G3s with 400 MHz before. 🤔

Anyway, the upgrade sounds like a beast, for sure! Let us know your results.

Yes, it seems odd to me too. I noticed that Apple still has the updates for iWork '09 on their website, so I downloaded the latest Leopard compatible update and plan on installing this update after I install iWork '09 on Leopard again. Maybe the update will help? I also plan on updating Quicktime to version 7.7. Apple doesn't have that version of Quicktime on their site anymore, so I had to find it elsewhere. I wonder why they took it down? 7.6.4 is still up, but not 7.7.

 

[swamprock]

I would absolutely install Leopard on it. One of my previous setups was a Sawtooth, with 2GB of ram, a SATA card, x4 SATA hard drives, a Geforce 6200, an Xserve G4 GigE NIC, and a dual 450Mhz CPU card. It ran Leopard like a dream. I later acquired a Mystic G4 and moved the same setup into it, only difference was I left the GigE card in the sawtooth for obvious reasons. And the Mystic already had a dual 500Mhz card in it. I loved using Leopard on that, too.
I just (literally yesterday) got a dual 1.42Ghz MDD and moved everything once again, into that only left out the Geforce which apperently doesn't work MDDs for some reason. Turns out it's PSU is flaky so I might end up putting it all back in my mystic for the time being.

Anyways, ignore the nay-sayers that say graphites are slow on leopard. You put a decent GPU in it and max out the ram, they run great. Since you've got a 1.5GHz CPU card, there's absolutely no reason why Leopard wouldn't fly on it.

Just don't even bother with that crappy Rage 128. The Rage 128 was obsolete by the time the Sawtooth was released, it's beyond me why apple contiued using it in literally every mac they made. Buy a Geforce 6200 and flash it; full core image and it works awesome.


I own like 5 or so graphite G4s, most of them are sawtooth's. I'm fairly certain that they are all a revision that takes dual CPUs. So it won't be hard. Just pick up the next sawtooth you see for sale, or go find an ewaste center. 85% of the time it'll be a later revision sawtooth.

I'll do that. Unfortunately, the local e-waste recyclers gut and part out old computers, regardless of what they are. I've gotten lucky a couple of times; bought two Indigo iBook G3s that were about to be gutted for $10; but they won't sell me anything that's been donated anymore. Oh well. Maybe I'll just take a chance on a main board from the 'bay. They're going for fairly cheap these days...

 

[bobesch]

What desirable machine!
Well, it should run iWorks'09, Office'08 and iMovie'06 fine on both Leopard and Tiger.
That machine ought to be preserved as a precious and top of crowd for native os9 and is great for Tiger/Classic.
Before making it struggle and fail on any heavy loads like with Leopard and streaming-video stuff, I'd rather look for an occasion of a sturdy early intel '09 core2duo machine /w SSD.

 

[MacFoxG4]

As promised, here's an update:

After the Leopard DVD arrived in the mail, I backed up the documents I had in Tiger and booted up from the Leopard DVD. I used Disk Utility to try and see if I could partition my OS X HDD into two partitions without erasing Tiger, but it was a no go. So, I formatted the drive as one partition and installed Leopard. Installation took about 45 minutes or so. Leopard does startup a bit slower than Tiger, but I expected that. I decided to check Apple System Profiler and noticed that the entry for Core Image said "software" instead of "not supported" like it did under Tiger. Curious, I ran Apple DVD player and it actually worked this time. After that, I updated Leopard to 10.5.8, which took a bit longer than expected, but it installed correctly.

For Quicktime, I decided to go with 7.7. I couldn't find anything saying that there was anything wrong with 7.7, so I still have no idea why Apple took down 7.7, but kept 7.6.4 up. I installed iTunes 10 after that followed by iWork '09. iWork '09 installed and ran just fine. Didn't even need to run the 9.0.4 update. I ran the update anyway because I had already downladed it. After that, I set up TFF and PowerUOC again.

I really like seeing the Leopard interface again. I think I like it better than Tiger's. I'm rethinking my original triple boot plan. I might just have this Mac be a Leopard/OS 9 dual boot setup and save Tiger for another Mac like my iBook G3.

I'm also thinking about doing an SSD upgrade in the Sawtooth. Would it be better to hook up the SSD via a SATA to IDE adapter or install a SATA PCI card and hook up the SSD to that?

 

[AphoticD]

Re: QT 7.7, I have installed this on my Leopard Macs and haven’t noticed any difference from 7.6.4, but I believe there have been mixed reports of both pros and cons. @Dronecatcher can probably chime in on this with his video playback expertise.

In terms of SSD performance, a SATA PCI Card would be the very fastest option, but you’d still see a major performance boost over the current HDD from a cheap SATA-IDE adapter, so it comes down to how much you want to spend.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Re: QT 7.7, I have installed this on my Leopard Macs and haven’t noticed any difference from 7.6.4, but I believe there have been mixed reports of both pros and cons.

It used to be essential for Youtube playback in LWK - maybe more noticably on portables. As a stand alone player there didn't seem to be any advantage in 7.7 - think it was just the engine used in browsers for HTML5 video.

 

[eyoungren]

I'm also thinking about doing an SSD upgrade in the Sawtooth. Would it be better to hook up the SSD via a SATA to IDE adapter or install a SATA PCI card and hook up the SSD to that?

I would use a SATA PCI card. Some of the members here who have used an adapter have reported issues, where those using a SATA PCI card have very rarely reported a problem.

The cards are cheap if you want to stay away from brands like Sonnet, Adaptec, etc. With the right PC card you can flash it and save money as well. I did this with my first SATA card. Cost me $5 on eBay plus my time in flashing it.

With a SATA card you can also go other routes. My G3 server has a PCI SATA card. But the cables I connected to it lead to an external PCI card bracket holding eSATA ports. That's allowed me to use a 2TB SATA RAID enclosure that has eSATA and a drive dock that also has eSATA.

Just my take on this.

 

[MacFoxG4]

I would use a SATA PCI card. Some of the members here who have used an adapter have reported issues, where those using a SATA PCI card have very rarely reported a problem.

The cards are cheap if you want to stay away from brands like Sonnet, Adaptec, etc. With the right PC card you can flash it and save money as well. I did this with my first SATA card. Cost me $5 on eBay plus my time in flashing it.

With a SATA card you can also go other routes. My G3 server has a PCI SATA card. But the cables I connected to it lead to an external PCI card bracket holding eSATA ports. That's allowed me to use a 2TB SATA RAID enclosure that has eSATA and a drive dock that also has eSATA.

Just my take on this.

The PCI SATA card option sounds the most appealing to me at the moment. I do have a Compaq Deskpro from 2001 that I could use to flash a card.

 

[eyoungren]

The PCI SATA card option sounds the most appealing to me at the moment. I do have a Compaq Deskpro from 2001 that I could use to flash a card.

You may want to look through this thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/guide-to-flashing-pc-sil3112-sata-cards-for-mac.1690231/

 

[MacFoxG4]

I got an eBay gift card for Christmas this year, so I decided to put it towards a 128mb Mac flashed Nvidia Geforce 6200 for my Sawtooth. Why 128mb and not 256? Because I noticed that with the flashed 256mb card, that the DVI port functions as VGA, so I would only be able to use the card via VGA. I like using DVI on this mac, so I opted for the 128mb card which doesn't seem to have this limitation. I was weary about getting the 6200 in the past because I knew it offered no acceleration and limited resolutions under OS 9. After thinking about it, I realized that I use OS X much more than I do 9 on this mac. I have other macs that can run OS 9 and below, so I don't need to have 9 on here. I just installed 9 because I knew I could. Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10 are the only OS 9-compatible applications I have that run better on my G4 than on my G3s and for that reason I wanted to keep OS 9 on here. PS 7 and Illustrator 10 don't work under Leopard, so I installed Adobe CS1 and so far it works under Leopard. I now think I can let go of OS 9 on this mac if I had to. The installer was a bit finicky, but after the third time launching it, I finally had CS1 installed under Leopard. Why CS1? Because it doesn't require product activation like CS2 and later. I know that the activation servers are gone for CS2 and CS3, but I'm not sure about CS4's activation servers?

I will post an update about how things go after I install the 6200. I plan on trying it out under both Leopard and OS 9. I still plan on doing that SSD upgrade, I just decided to do the 6200 first because the seller only had one left in stock.

 

[Eightbitgamer757]

im not sure if this site works anymore, but this is/was a nice place to find apps for older OS's. also i think you might like the PPC App Store (LINK: https://ppcappstore.wordpress.com ). hope this helps

 

[MacFoxG4]

Well the Geforce 6200 has arrived. I just installed it and here are my impressions so far:

Leopard
-Not much difference in performance between this and the Radeon 9000. TenFourFox and CS1 run about the same as before. Was I supposed to reinstall Leopard or update any drivers?

OS 9
-It boots
-DVD playback no longer works
-Sci-fi Pinball no longer works
-The cursor disappears in Photoshop 7 when using tools such as blur and the eraser.

Due to these issues in OS 9, I think I will erase it from hard drive #1 and set HDD #2 (the one with Leopard on it) as the primary drive if I decide to stick with the 6200.

On a more upbeat note, I discovered that Leopard Webkit still works with YouTube. Videos at 360p play very well.

 

[timidpimpin]

You're not going to see improvements in the type of thing you tried in Leopard. What the 6200 will give you over the 9000 is Core Image support in Leopard and Tiger. It will also give you slightly better gaming performance.

If you're not sure what Core Image is all about... it's an OS feature in Tiger and up where it uses a capable GPU to do most of the 2D computation. This takes load off the CPU, and can give you better performance in some situations. But not really better graphic performance. Better overall system performance. But not that much.

Let's put it this way... the 6200 is about the best GPU you can put in a Sawtooth or Gigabit Ethernet without adding a more powerful PSU.

 

[MacFoxG4]

You're not going to see improvements in the type of thing you tried in Leopard. What the 6200 will give you over the 9000 is Core Image support in Leopard and Tiger. It will also give you slightly better gaming performance.

If you're not sure what Core Image is all about... it's an OS feature in Tiger and up where it uses a capable GPU to do most of the 2D computation. This takes load off the CPU, and can give you better performance in some situations. But not really better graphic performance. Better overall system performance. But not that much.

Let's put it this way... the 6200 is about the best GPU you can put in a Sawtooth or Gigabit Ethernet without adding a more powerful PSU.

Thanks for clearing things up.

 

[MacFoxG4]

Well after much thought, I have decided to go back to the Radeon 9000. For the apps I am currently running under Leopard, hardware accelerated core image support doesn't seem to be necessary. "Software" core image support with the Radeon 9000 installed seems to be good enough. It took me actually buying and installing the Geforce 6200 to realize that. I don't regret buying the card because I know I would have always been curious about it and wondered "what if?"

 

[timidpimpin]

IMO you made the wrong choice. A 6200 is a better card than a 9000. And the "software" setting your core image runs at means it's running on the CPU and slowing it down overall.

 

[Amethyst1]

IMO you made the wrong choice. A 6200 is a better card than a 9000. And the "software" setting your core image runs at means it's running on the CPU and slowing it down overall.

On top of that, CI gives you the translucent menu bar in Leopard. This is just my opinion but I find the opaque grey menu bar to be absolutely hideous.

 

[eyoungren]

On top of that, CI gives you the translucent menu bar in Leopard. This is just my opinion but I find the opaque grey menu bar to be absolutely hideous.

Which is why my menubars are black - which requires the transparent menubar feature to be turned off.