Low End Mac Reader Specials

Memory To Go Special: MacPro 8 Core 8GB kit $232 / 4GB kit $116 / 2GB kit $72. New Macbook 2GB DDR3-$65. HARD DRIVES available -- Free shipping / LIfetime warranty.

Download Typestyler, still the Ultimate Styling Tool for Internet, Print and Video Graphics. Works great in Classic with a Native OS X Version on the way. Free Tryout: www.typestyler.com

LA Computer Company: Specials on AppleCare, iMac's, MacBook Pros and more. Optical Drives for Apple iBooks, Powerbooks, MacBooks, MacBook Pros in Stock. Call 1-800-941-7654 Click Here.

OWC: OWC Mercury On-The-Go FW400/800/USB2/eSATA Portables. High Performance A/V Rated. Bus Powered. Up to 500GB in the Palm of your Hand. Macworld Editor's Choice. CNET 'Very Good.' From $75.99!

Poker Mac Don't install Parallels to play poker online! Poker Mac will show you how to download and install a native Mac poker application such as Full Tilt Poker Mac.

Laptop Hardware Provided by TechRestore - Overnight Mac & iPod Repairs.

Compare products like desktop computers, apple laptops, apple macs, and LCD Monitors side by side! All the information and reviews to make the best purchasing decision for new mobile phones, sat nav systems, or MP3 players. The Ciao online shopping community makes searching products easy for you.

Mac Musings

Older Macs in the Age of Leopard

Leopard Faster than Tiger on Intel, Slower on PowerPC, and Possible Below 867 MHz

Dan Knight - 2007.10.29 - Tip Jar

del.icio.us Bookmark in del.icio.us

Primate Labs picked up a copy of Leopard and posted the first Geekbench results for the iMac (2.0 GHz Core 2) and Power Mac G5 (single 1.6 GHz) on Saturday. Leopard was tested in both 32-bit and 64-bit modes and compared with Tiger, which is strictly a 32-bit operating system.

Slower on a Power Mac

We've been used to better performance as Mac OS X evolved from the Public Beta through version 10.3. With Tiger (10.4), that ended. And with Leopard, if these benchmark results are a fair indicator, there's a real performance hit.

Overall performance results for the Power Mac G5 with 1.25 GB of RAM show Tiger as the fastest with a score of 1013, 32-bit Leopard in second place (over 10% slower at 898), and 64-bit Leopard trailing that by an additional 5% (853). 64-bit Leopard tends to lag because 64-bit commands are larger and thus take longer to load under PowerPC architecture.

Looking at different components of the overall score, stream performance under 32-bit Leopard is better than under Tiger (by about 7%), but 64-bit Leopard is slower than Tiger.

Memory performance is almost identical for 32-bit and 64-bit Leopard, but about 7% behind Tiger, and floating point performance is best under Tiger, with 64-bit Leopard 5% behind and 32-bit Leopard 5% slower than that.

In short, for best performance, PowerPC Macs should stick with Tiger, and if you want to run Leopard on a G5 system, the additional overhead of a 64-bit OS seems to offset any advantage.

Faster on an Intel Mac

As widely expected, Leopard appears to be optimized for the Intel x86 architecture. 32-bit Leopard is overall a bit slower than Tiger (on the order of 3%), and 64-bit Leopard is the speed champion overall (6-7%) and in three of four benchmarks.

Looking at specific benchmarks, 64-bit OS X 10.5 is 15% faster than Tiger for integer performance (32-bit Leopard is about 2% slower), 5% faster for floating point math (32-bit Leopard trails by 3%), and 5% faster for stream performance (with 32-bit Leopard trailing Tiger by a mere 0.7%).

Memory performance is where Tiger trumps both versions of Leopard: both versions of 10.5 are about 5.5% slower on Intel hardware.

Of course, Geekbench only tests certain areas of performance, and graphic drivers under Leopard may make a big difference that Geekbench won't measure.

Leopard on Unsupported Macs

We have read several reports of people running Mac OS X 10.5 on G4 Macs slower than 867 MHz, even though the installer refuses to function on these systems (not even the dual 800 MHz Power Mac G4).

The only know solution at present requires that you have a supported PowerPC Mac (it may be possible using an Intel Mac, but we suspect that won't work) and use that to install Leopard on a hard drive, take that drive to the unsupported G4 Mac, and boot from it. Field reports indicate this works with both external FireWire drives and internal IDE hard drives.

We've also read at Macs Only! that an external drive with Leopard installed can be cloned to a G4 Mac's internal drive (in their case, a pair of Power Mac G4 Cubes) using Carbon Copy Cloner, making it possible to use a single FireWire drive to get Leopard up and running on several unsupported Macs.

We have not yet read any reports of Leopard being installed on unsupported hardware using FireWire Disk Mode and installing from a supported PowerPC Mac. Theoretically it should work.

Anyhow, there are some issues with unsupported hardware. Engadget reports that while Time Machine will do backup on an AGP Power Mac (with a 1 GHz CPU upgrade), it can't run the part of the program that lets you recover files. On that system, they also reported that DVD Player would not work, VLC was dropping a lot of frames, and Front Row wouldn't function. Other than that, Leopard works. LEM

Dan Knight has been using Macs since 1986, sold Macs for several years, supported them for many more years, and has been publishing Low End Mac since April 1997. If you find Dan's articles helpful, please consider making a donation to his tip jar.

Recent Mac Musings

Links for the Day

Recent Content on Low End Mac

Recent Deals

About LEM | Support | Usage | Privacy | Contacts

Entire Low End Mac website copyright ©1997-2009 by Cobweb Publishing, Inc., unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. Advice presented in good faith, but what works for one may not work for all. Please report errors to .
  LINKS: We allow and encourage links to any public page as long as the linked page does not appear within a frame that prevents bookmarking it.
  Access our RSS news feed at http://lowendmac.com/feed.xml.
  Email may be published at our discretion; email addresses will not be published without permission, and we will encrypt them in hopes of avoiding spammers. If you prefer your message not be published, mark it "not for publication." Letters may be edited for length, context, and to match house style.
  PRIVACY: We don't collect personal information unless you explicitly provide it. For more details, see our Terms of Use.
  Low End Mac is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh, iBook, iMac, eMac, iPod, iPhone, PowerBook, MacBook, MagSafe, Mac Pro, Apple TV, and AirPort are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are hereby acknowledged.


Navigation

Used Mac Dealers
Apple History
Video Cards
Email Lists

Favorite Sites

MacSurfer
MacMinute
MacInTouch
MyAppleMenu
InfoMac
Macs Only!
The Mac Observer
Accelerate Your Mac
RetroMacCast
PB Central
MacWindows
The Vintage Mac
   Museum
DealMac
DealsOnTheWeb
Mac2Sell
ramseeker
Mac Driver Museum
JAG's House
System 6 Heaven
System 7 Today
the pickle's Low-End
   Mac FAQ
Abandonware
   Petition
Mac vs. PC Info

Affiliates

The Apple Store
Mac Connection
MacMall
TechRestore
ExperCom
Crucial Memory
batteries.com

Have a question?
Ask an expert!

Advertise

All of our advertising is handled by BackBeat Media. For price quotes and advertising information, please contact at BackBeat Media (646-546-5194). This number is for advertising only.

Open Link

Problems viewing this page with Internet Explorer 5.5 or 6? It works fine in other browsers, including IE 7. We recommend Firefox for those using Windows, as it is standards based and more secure than IE 6 (and earlier). More LEM visitors use Firefox than any other browser.