speed problems on mac G4

I'm having alot of problems with the speed of my machine to process i only have 256 mb ram and a 800mhz processor will upping the ram help or do i need a new processor/machine?

can i get a processor for a mac? am i wasting my time with this old but loved machine?

prof hoffman

Yes, several companies sell processor upgrades. Sonnet has several. Secondly, that is way too little ram. All of my machines have at least 512, most of em have 1 gig. Ram is not so expensive. Also, graphics card is a major factor in performance. Make sure that you meet the minumum system requirements for SL if you want it to run nice.

thanks alot i thought i'd have to get a new mac i'll have a look at sonnet!

Hey, if you can afford it, a G5 runs it superbly. Highly recomend em, you'll love it if you do graphics work.

i really don't know what to make of the choice do you know where i can get some advice?

thanks!

I'm a photographer but not quite at the point where i can buy a new machine though ibet it kicks the crap out of this lovely old sock...

I dont know how fast it will run SL, but the new iBooks are small, fast, and relativly affordable. I might get one for myself. If I do, I'll post how it runs SL.

Hi prof

I had my (also much loved) G4 pretty much maxed out with upgrades - 1.25Ghz Sonnet CPU card, Radeon 8500 GPU, 1.5Gb RAM, faster disks etc, and still it struggled badly with SL. There are a number of things like the data throughput on the main bus to consider - the old G4's suffered somewhat in this regard.

I now have a G5 - the difference is like night and day - freedom to move !

I appreciate your comment about buying a new machine, but what you need to do is weigh up the cost of buying upgrades, particularly for the CPU, because all the CPU upgrades are several hundred pounds a go, even from eBay, plus RAM, graphics card etc, against the cost of buying a new machine (offset perhaps by the sale of your old one), bearing in mind that after the upgrades, the older machine will still have fundamental bottlenecks induced by the motherboard - whereas, with a new machine you have new architecture to work with and a machine that can more readily deal with the data thrown at it by SL. Apple have actually just introduced a 'bottom of the range' single CPU 1.8Ghz G5 desktop Mac.

Lots of RAM is a must for OS X and SL, get as close to 1Gb as you can. I use 2Gb !

Just my two pennorth anyway

goshua i would really be interested on how it does with an ibook sadly i think my chances of justifying a new G5 desktop are slim dee, i'll see how i struggle on for now

thanks

One frequently underlooked factor in running SL well is memory bandwidth. The G4-800 desktops shipped with PC100 SDRAM and a 100Mhz memory bus.

The factors for a speedy SL experience tend to be CPU, RAM, memory bandwidth, network connection, video card -- in that order.

Basically, while you should be able to double or quadruple your RAM fairly cheaply, you're still going to have a somewhat sluggish memory bus. Simply sticking it full of RAM or getting a faster CPU may not resolve all your problems, though it'd certainly be a start.

I should warn you though, you're going to have to pay at LEAST a couple hundred dollars US just for a new CPU, and that's just to get to 1000Mhz or so. If you wanted to do that, plus get some RAM, you could probably build an entire PC. And it would likely run SL better than your G4. Depressing, huh?

If you decide you want to upgrade or even build a second computer for games and SL, I can make some recommendations.

I have the prevues generation iBook. Sl runs.. but it runs really slow, and if I do any thing else on the comp. It starts to lag by minutes, and then the computer takes for ever just to switch apps. Or do any thing at all.

I know the powerbooks run sl decently. One of the things that surprised me was the world map. On my ibook, 12" pb, dual 500 g4 with geforce 4 ti. Each tile takes a good amount of time to load. But on the pb 15" the maps loads up under 30 seconds. All tile texture, no fuzzy.

If you have a dual comp. The upgrade card cost as much as an iMac. A single prosser iMac would probable out perform an old g4 tower. Even if the tower had a 256 mb video card, 2 gigs of ram, and dual 1ghtz prossers.

I run SL on a powerbook - 1 GHz G4, 512Mb RAM, 32Mb GeForce video card. It runs, but my normal FPS is 2 or so, and I never go above 8 FPS even in an empty brand-new Sim.

I suspect the video card is the bottleneck here, and notice current powerbooks come with 64Mb of video RAM now.

Is there any way I could up the video RAM in my current powerbook at a reasonable cost? And would that make much difference anyway?

no and yes. Your power book comes with a built in video card. Small cards have less video memory. The less memory you have the more often sl need to swap texture in and out of video memory. Uploading texture into video memory can be bus intensive. Plus there are several video card that render faster when texture are store rather then being uploaded constantly. resampling texture can also create allot of processor work.

Unforchently because the video card is part of the mother board; it's pretty much impossible to upgrade. But if you are low in ram. adding more ram, may improve performance dramatically.

I just started a couple of days ago - after the invisible Avatar issue (must turn off Preferences->Options->Avatar Vertex Program), I find the speed of SL quite tolerable except for:

1. Slow text entry in chat - that's the biggest pain and should be easiest to fix.
2. It takes about a minute for a scene to fully render around me after movement - I fly into buildings because I can't see them.
3. Although I have a good Internet connection (3 Mbps down, at least .6 Mbps up), I sometimes get dropped packets so that there's not response to commands for 5 seconds or so.

Based on the FPS indicator range of 0-45 FPS, I suspect PCs are getting a lot better frame rate than this, but I don't know.

The iBook G4 uses a Radeon 9200 according to Apple specs. This 1GHz one has 32MB video ram. This meets SL system requirements, barely.

I found that changing some of the settings here helped some:
http://secondlife.com/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Changing+Preferences+for+best+performance

I'm curious what you dual 2 gig G5 users are getting...