MDD Questions

[shelflife19]

Ok, i have a decision to make, and cant make up mind or find sutable answers. First i was building a MDD 1.25ghz DP, but things started tog et expensive. and this week i actually found a real nice deal on a MDD for $225 off of craigslist. i was pleased to get it since the motherboard / psu / 1.25dp was going to cost twice if not triple that, it came with osx 10.5, and running alittle sluggish, so i popped in a ATI Radeon 9200, still ran sluggish so i just put osx 10.4 back on it (i would guess this first questions needs to be in the software section but hopefully it will get anwsered) but first my G4 specs.

2003 MDD single G4 1.25ghz
2gb ram
ati radeon 9200 128mb
dvd rw dl
1x160gb hdd
2x80gb hdd

Q 1. Was 10.5 running sluggish because of the video cards or because of lack of cpu power...im assuming the video card, because theres no core image on either of the video cards?

Q 2. im considering upgrading to atleast 1.25ghz DP but hoping to find a deal on 1.42ghz DP (very rare to find them on ebay) it doesn;t make any since to upgrade to a sonnet for $600, seems like a waste of money, but back to the question, will the DP 1.25ghz or 1.42ghz work with my model G4, i would assume so since they both have the same bus speed?

Q 3. When i play games i cant play them at full speed, for example Urban Terror i can only play it at 800x600 with the texture quality on high, anything more and its choppy, im assuming thats because of the lack of video power? or is it CPU issues?

Q 4. Whats the best video card for the MDD models?

My uses for this computer:
Software development
Photoshop/Illustrator
Blender 3d/Maya/Poser
Gaming - IE: Urban Terror, XIII, NeverWinter Nights, hopefully when/if i upgrade the cpu Quake4.
and then web surfing, email, music, movies etc etc blah blah.

I would like to make this main computer if possible, but i dont thinkt hats gonna happen untill i get out of school and can afford a mac pro.

 

[harryb2448]

1,25 processor will run Leopard just fine and with 2GB RAM no problems at all. A DP should be plug and play subbject to the single having the 167 system bus speed.

Most of your problems may well come from the video card. Most 9200 are in fact PCI cards and not AGP4X so check that out. An ATI Radeon 9600/9800 handles Leopard's Core Image and Quartz Extreme no problems

Internet Explorer on Macs is dead and buried, concluding at about version 5.2.1 so use Safari or Firefox 3.

Before installing any system software run Repair Disk whilst booted from the install DVD. After install complete run repair Permissions, update if necessary and run Repair Permissions again.

Then regularly use a maintenance program such as Onyx or Main Menu to keep the OS in pristine condition.

 

[shelflife19]

The video card that was in it was the stock nvidia card, i think it was a 64mb geforece4, even though its 64mb vs 128mb would it actually be better that the card i have? both of them were running sluggish under leopard, maybe it was just because it was a corrupted os install?

 

[harryb2448]

That is because you need a faster video card. Look for the 9600/9800 ATI Radeon Mac Pros. Use a 9600 with 256MG VRAM.

The standard video card in MDD was an ATI Radeon 9000 or the nVidia you mentioned and neither are Tiger/Leopard compatible, but will work with greatly reduced capacity as you are finding.

 

[shelflife19]

Yeah i try NOT to use any microsoft products, but occansional you have to use office for something these days, Open office isn't exactly 100% compatable with office files and vice versa, so i cant use it. Even on my windows box i dont even use internet explorer, im thinking about installing safari on it instead of firefox, because firefox hogs system usuage after its been running for a while, i didn;t even install it on my mac because of that same reason.

When you say main menu are you talking about the mac updater to do updates when there aviable, and what is onyx?

 

[harryb2448]

Main Menu is a utility which runs various maintenance scripts on a daily, weekly, monthly basis and clear caches etc. Onyx is similar. Do a Google and download and have a look at either.