How Fast Is It? Legacy Macs on Steroids--Part 2, OS X 10.1

Our legacy Power Mac test platforms are a Power Mac 7300 and a Power Computing PowerBase 180. Previously, we had upgraded both with G3 CPU (see this review for the PowerBase). In September (see Legacy Macs on Steroids--Part 1) we upgraded both of them further with a 450 MHz G4 CPU, lots of RAM, a 10 GB Maxtor ATA66 hard drive and a 12x8x32x Sony CRX160E CD-RW drive, all for less than $600 each. Everything worked well on both platforms with Mac OS 9.1, including the CD burner with iTunes and Toast 4.1.3. A problem that we reported with the PowerBase was subsequently solved by simply reinstalling iTunes.

So what about OS X 10.1? Mac OS X will not install on legacy Power Macs (i.e. those prior to the Apple Beige G3's) without a hack. Unsupported UtilityX, an application by Ryan Rempel, makes the job easy. The current version of UUX, 2.0b4, permits upgrading Mac OS X 10.0.x to 10.1. In addition to installing Mac OS X, a hack is needed to enable the G4's L2 backside cache. Ryan Rempel's L2CacheConfig utility application accomplishes this--version 3.2 works with Mac OS X 10.1.

Rempel's applications are compatible with Power Macs 7300-9600 and equivalent clones. Unfortunately, this excludes the PowerBase. We confirmed that UUX does not work with the PowerBase. Other hacks may but we have not tried them. Rempel's page contains additional compatibility information on drives, controller cards and graphics cards. Be sure to check this page before attempting to upgrade to Mac OS X on a legacy Power Mac.

Our 7300 is set up so the main hard drive is an IBM 4.5 GB SCSI drive. The Maxtor 10 GB ATA hard drive is a secondary drive attached to a Sonnet Tempo ATA66 controller card in one of the three PCI slots. The 7300 will boot up off either drive in Mac OS 9.1. The Sony CD burner has an ATA interface so it is attached to the second channel of the Sonnet card. The original Apple CD ROM drive is a SCSI and, as it turns out, we were lucky to still have it. We added all of our available legacy RAM in the 7300's 8 slots to bring it up to 472 MB. We prepared for Mac OS X by wiping the IBM hard drive, installing a fresh copy of Mac OS 9.1, updating 9.1 via the Software Update control panel and selecting the 9.1 All extensions set. Then we downloaded the latest versions of Ryan Rempel's Unsupported UtilityX and L2CacheConfig and ran the latter under 9.1 to create the configuration file.

To install Mac OS X, one inserts the Mac OS X CD (in our case it was v10.0.3), opens UUX, configures it and clicks restart. We had successfully used a previous version of UUX to install 10.0.4 on our 7300 (see this review) prior to the recent upgrades but initially we couldn't get the latest version of UUX to work. Our 7300 stalled and froze after restarting. Then we noticed that the files installed by UUX before restarting directed booting from a SCSI device--our new CD-RW is an ATA device. We switched out the Sony CD-RW for the original SCSI Apple CD ROM drive and then Mac OS X proceeded to install normally. When done we enabled the 7300's L2 cache with Rempel's L2CacheConfig and ran the Software Update preference panel to upgrade to 10.0.4 and any other updates. The latter may not have been necessary but we were not certain.

Updating to Mac OS X 10.1 was just a repeat of installing Mac OS X 10.0.3. However, the update took an extremely long time to complete, on the order of 2 hours plus. We don't know precisely because we didn't sit and watch it happen. We ran the L2CacheConfig application again just to make sure that the L2 cache was enabled and ran the Software Update preference panel to get Internet Explorer 5.1.3 and Security Update.

Startup and Shut Down. These functions took a long time in Mac OS X prior to v10.1 so the first thing we did was to time these actions separately, including launching the Classic Mode. Here are the results compared with 10.0.4 on our 7300 running a 400 MHz G3 and a 450 MHz G4 Cube running 10.1:

Average Times in Full Seconds

Action	7300 400 MHz G3 - 10.04	7300 450 MHz G4 - 10.1	G4 Cube 450 MHz - 10.1
Startup Chime to Login	-	87	68
Login to Desktop	-	15	9
Classic Mode	60	49	46
Shut Down	-	5	4

The 7300 running 10.1 is not as fast as the Cube in these actions. The 7300's drive, RAM and system bus is slower than the Cube's so this is not surprising. However, that actual margins are not appreciable. The one action that we previously timed for the 7300 running 10.0.4 on a 400 MHz G3, launching Classic Mode, the time is reduced to nearly that of the Cube.

Application Launch Times. We measured the launch times of an application in Classic Mode, two that are Carbonized and one in Cocoa. Here are the results.

Average Launch Times in Full Seconds (No L2 Cache in parentheses)

Application	7300 400 MHz G3	7300 450 MHz G4 - 10.1	G4 Cube 450 MHz
Netscape 4.77	5	2	2
AppleWorks 6.1b/6.2.1	9	3	2
Internet Explorer 5.1.1/5.1.3	11	3	2
System Preferences	4	2	1

Application Use. We ran Altivec Fractal Carbon to illustrate how the 7300's raw CPU power compares with the G4 Cube's. Let1kWindowsBloom records the time it takes to open and close 1000 windows. We opened the manual, a 144-page PDF file with loads of graphics, for Virtual PC 4.0 in Adobe Acrobat 5 and timed how long it took to scroll through the whole document. Finally, we placed all six clips of the iMovie Tutorial end to end and exported the movie as a QuickTime file with the "CD ROM Movie, Medium" setting. Here are the results:

Average Times in Full Seconds (gigaflops in parentheses)

Application	7300 400 MHz G3	7300 450 MHz G4 - 10.1	G4 Cube 450 MHz
Altivec Fractal Carbon	-	9.9 (1.4)	9.8 (1.4)
Let1kWindowsBloom	-	101	60
Scroll in Acrobat 5	188	144	82
Export QT Movie	-	188	146

The raw power of both computers are the same which is not surprising since they have the same CPU. There is a major difference in the 2D graphics performance as illustrated by Let1kWindowsBloom and scrolling in Acrobat 5, due in part to the 50 MHz vs 100 MHz system bus difference. The same is true for the iMovie export. We do not know how much the graphics performance would improve if we installed a supported graphics card like the ATI Radeon since Mac OS X does not yet use the graphics chip for 2D work.

In summary, an upgraded 7300 runs Mac OS X 10.1 reasonably well. The major issue is 2D graphics performance. In addition, CD burning in Mac OS X 10.1 is another major drawback, at least so far. We were unable to burn a CD from the Finder or from iTunes. Neither function recognized our Sony CRX160E CD-RW. However, CD burning worked fine in Mac OS 9.1, both from iTunes and Toast 4.1.3, so maybe something did not get installed when we used the SCSI CD drive to install 10.1. We will continue to work on this and report any success.