Older PowerPC Mac? Tiger said better than Leopard

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Older PowerPC Mac? Tiger said better than Leopard

18 July 2011 3,636 views 10 Comments

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When I sold our 1.25GHz Mac mini G4, the buyer wanted it loaded with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and Classic, plus games like Marathon and Civ II. Aside from choking on Adobe Flash — some things never change — Mac OS 9.2.2 was slippery fast on that machine and it seemed Tiger performed better than Leopard, the OS version that had been previously loaded on it.

That was likely the last time, back in 2008, I touched a PowerPC Mac of any kind. However, the impression stuck with me.

Thereupon, I read with interest Low End Mac’s comparison, including benchmarks, of Tiger and Leopard running on a Titanium PowerBook.

If the apps you want run in Tiger, I would stick with it and get the maximum speed and performance you can out of your low-end Mac. If you have a Mac that officially supports Leopard or need Leopard for a certain piece of software (perhaps features like Spaces and Time Machine), run Leopard.

Yes, it’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison, but there was something special about Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and the LEM’s conclusions ring true. Moreover, Leopard was widely regarded as being more than just a little bloated, particularly so on PPC models.

What are you running on your PowerPC Mac?

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10 Comments »

Dan Knight said:

I run Tiger and Leopard daily on G4 Power Macs, and I have to say that Tiger both feels faster and benchmarks faster. In fact, I’d say my dual 1 GHz MDD Power Mac G4 more than holds its own against a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo Mac mini with Snow Leopard and just 1 GB of RAM – I have to keep quitting apps to keep the Intel Mac from bogging down horribly while the Tiger G4 Power Mac (with 2 GB of RAM) never seems to run out of memory with Classic Mode, Camino, Safari, Photoshop Elements 3.0, AppleWorks, TextWrangler, Text Soap, and Tex-Edit Plus almost always active.

# 18 July 2011 at 1:47 am

PhillyG said:

@Dan Knight

There is a difference between “low end” and “stupid” A Mac Mini with 8GB is low end; a Mac Mini with 1GB is stupid when you can buy 8GB for $60 (http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-CT2KIT51264BC1067-204-PIN-PC3-8500-SODIMM/dp/B001MX5YWI/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1310999896&sr=8-2)

I also have a dual USB iBook with 384MB. I downgraded from Tiger back to Panther several years ago. Now it runs Debian squeeze.

# 18 July 2011 at 10:46 am

John klos said:

@PhillyG: What’s “stupid” is buying 8 gigs of memory for a machine which can’t take it. We’re all glad you have enough money to think a relatively new Mac mini with 8 gigs is “low end”, but that’s both subjective and also not very representative of the age of equipment at which people consider replacing.

# 18 July 2011 at 11:23 am

Charles said:

That’s funny, my older PowerPC Mac runs great on OS 9.0.4.

Oh wait, it’s really a clone (a Umax S900). Well, anyway, back to another round of MechWarrior 2…

I ran OS X Tiger on it, and I have to say, while the websurfing and email was ok, the bus speed and other limitations really made it not worth it. So, back to OS 9 we went.

I took out the Sonnet G4 1GHz upgrade, and went with the G3, because I couldn’t boot into my BeOS partition with the G4 in, but I digress ;^)

# 18 July 2011 at 6:31 pm

Phillyg said:

A 2GHz core 2 duo Mac mini can hold more than 1GB. Maxing the memory is a better move than downgrading the OS if your apps are sluggish.

# 18 July 2011 at 7:20 pm

Love Pussy said:

I’ve still got the first Titanium 500MHz and Last Titanium 1GHz Powerbok and they both run Tiger and OS9.
Using older versions of Office, it blows away any windows new machines and Newer Macs using Excel Files that are 50MB or more.

Especially OS9, it is just freakin unbelievable.

OS9 was much more straightforward and easier to use and manage
as for OSX, someone who has no background in programming like myself.
It is just too freakin complicated man.
Any major problems and i just have to reinstall everything.

# 18 July 2011 at 8:01 pm

MacGilles said:

Hey Charles, I remember my Starmax 4000, a Motorola Clone. Never had OS X on it, but it was a very computer and very tought (5 years warranty included when Apple take lots of money with its 3 years AppleCare). I sold it to a member of my Apple User Group. But I would have bought many other Starmax if Steve Jobs didn’t stop the Mac OS licencing program.

I was using BeOS too !

My others PPC Mac runs Leopard if they can (my wife’s Powerbook G4 1.67 and my mother’s Titanium 867), my Cube G4/450 is on Tiger, but my old tangerine clamshell is stuck with Panther And I won’t speak about my old 6100 !

Leopard is very usefull for me cause of the iChat Desktop Sharing for easily helping my familly if needed.

# 19 July 2011 at 8:45 am

davy said:

I’ve been using Leopard on my iMac G4 (1.25 Ghz, 1.25 Gb RAM) for several years with absolutely no problems to speak of. Panther, the OS that came with the machine, feels somewhat faster in certain situations (e.g. smoother animations with Exposé), but for me the ability to use a (more) modern browser and useful features like TimeMachine, QuickLook, Spotlight, etc. on this old machine far outweighs any minor speed advantage I might have with Panther or Tiger.

# 19 July 2011 at 10:47 am

Grendelgrumble said:

I run Leopard on a 1.42Ghz emac with 1.5GB RAM (and a Core Image capable graphics card), which feels a little sluggish. I run tiger on a 1.25Ghz emac with 512MB RAM, and its feels much faster in normal operation.

My dual 1Ghz Powermac G4 with 2GB RAM running Tiger is by far the fastest though.

# 19 July 2011 at 11:23 am

tcarlson said:

I never had the option of running Leopard on my old PowerMac G4 Digital Audio so I can’t compare the performance of Tiger vs. Leopard. Tiger always ran well enough on it, but now that Apple (and Adobe, and everyone else, it seems) has dropped support, I’ve moved on to MintPPC Linux. It’s lightweight LXDE GUI is very snappy on this old beast and the updates to security and browsers come out on a regular basis.

# 19 July 2011 at 2:27 pm