Member Avatar for Max1945

I'm new to DaniWeb and I hope that someone can help me solve an issue. My iBook G4 1.2 GHz machine is almost twice as fast as my PowerMac G4 tower 1.8 GHz machine. Why would that be? I suspect that part of the problem with the PowerMac is with its original ATI Rage 128 Pro video card, but I've ordered a new Radeon 9200 AGP card. Could the bus speed slowing the PowerMac down that much? Is there anything that I can do to speed up the machine? I really do like the old PowerMac and can't afford to purchase anything new just now (both machines are running OS 10.4.11). Thanks for any help. Max1945

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Clock speed alone does not determine real-world responsiveness. Differences in CPU revision (pipeline and cache), system bus and memory bandwidth, disk health and access times, video acceleration, and available RAM all combine to make one G4 feel noticeably faster than another. was right to flag RAM and background processes — heavy paging or a noisy background daemon will swamp a faster-clocked CPU and make the machine feel much slower.

A practical troubleshooting checklist, roughly in order of cheapest/fastest checks:

  • Inspect Activity Monitor (Applications → Utilities) and sort by CPU, Real Mem and Page Outs to find runaway processes or heavy swapping.

  • Verify disk health and S.M.A.R.T. status in Disk Utility; repair permissions and run the built-in maintenance scripts if they haven’t run. Example Terminal commands that are safe on 10.4.11:

    sudo mdutil -a -i off
sudo mdutil -a -E
sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

  • Reset PRAM (hold Command+Option+P+R at boot until the startup chime repeats) and check for bad or mismatched RAM modules in System Profiler.

  • Boot from a known-good external disk (FireWire) or clone of the OS: if performance improves, the problem is the internal drive or the OS install.

About the video card: the original ATI Rage 128 Pro is quite old and lacks modern acceleration; a Radeon 9200 can help graphics and UI responsiveness, but only if it is a Mac-compatible (Mac-ROM or "Mac edition") card or has been correctly flashed. Non-Mac PC cards will often run in basic VGA mode under OS X and won’t give the expected acceleration.

If hardware fixes are needed, prioritize adding RAM (enough to avoid swapping), replacing an aging hard drive with a faster unit, and ensuring adequate cooling (clean dust, check fans). After those checks, if the PowerMac still trails the iBook, the culprit is usually a combination of an older G4 revision (less performance per clock) plus slow I/O rather than a single obvious fault.

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Member Avatar for Rick150

RAM makes a big difference, more the better & check whats running in the background using up cpu cycles.
This utility is good for finding out whats going on.
http://developer.mabwebdesign.com/
Called
App Stop.

Member Avatar for Max1945

RAM makes a big difference, more the better & check whats running in the background using up cpu cycles.
This utility is good for finding out whats going on.
http://developer.mabwebdesign.com/
Called
App Stop.

Tthanks for the advice and info. I'll definitely give it a try.

Max

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