Mac OS X on a Power Mac 8500--How Fast Is It?

We installed Mac OS X 10.0.3 on our legacy Power Mac 8500 using Ryan Rempel's installer utility, Unsupported UtilityX. The CPU in the 8500 has been upgraded from a 120 MHz PowerPC 604 to a 250 MHz PowerPC 604e manufactured by site sponsor PowerLogix. RAM is a minimal 88 MB and an IBM 7200 rpm 4.5 GB SCSI drive has replaced the original 1 GB Conner hard drive. Otherwise the 8500 is stock. It is not supported by Apple for Mac OS X. The Mac OS X installer tells you so if you try to install Mac OS X without Rempel's Unsupported UtilityX.

Unsupported UtilityX is easy to use. We just put the Mac OS X CD in the CD drive, launched Unsupported UtilityX, set the "From" location (the CD Drive) and "To" location (the target drive for Mac OS X) and clicked Start. A number of files were copied from the CD and the 8500 automatically restarted from the Mac OS X CD. A normal, if a bit slow, installation of Mac OS X ensued. We installed Mac OS X on the same drive with Mac OS 9.0.4 and 9.1 on a second internal hard drive for Classic mode.

We found Mac OS X to be just a bit unstable on our 8500. System Preferences, the Finder and other applications occasionally quit and had to be restarted but this is no problem with Mac OS X other than the annoyance it causes. Our 8500 is similarly a bit unstable with Mac OS 9.1 but is rock solid with Mac OS 9.0.4.

Rebooting from Mac OS X into 9.1 or 9.0.4 was also problematic. The first time we followed the normal procedure and selected the 9.1 drive in the Startup Disk application and clicked the restart button. The result was a coma. We couldn't get the 8500 to startup with either drive or the CD, just a black screen. We were able to revive the 8500 by zapping PRAM, i.e. holding down the command-option-p-r keys after pressing the power key. Booting back into Mac OS X was easy using Rempel's Unsupported UtilityX.

Still, Mac OS X ran on the 8500, more slowly than our other G3/G4 Macs but not too slowly to be useable. So we ran some benchmarks against our 450 MHz G4 Cube with 384 MB RAM and otherwise stock. We timed how long it took for Classic to launch from Mac OS X, how long it took to launch three web browsers (Classic, Carbon and Cocoa) and how long it took to scroll completely through the Virtual PC 4 manual (144p of text and graphics) using Adobe Acrobat 5. Here are the results:

Average Time for Action in Seconds

Action	250 MHz 604e 8500	450 MHz G4 Cube
Launch Classic Mode	165	53
Launch Netscape 4.77	9	3
Launch I'Explorer 5.1.1	23	8
Launch OmniWeb 4.0.1	30	13
Scroll VPC 4 Manual	>120	72

In everything but scrolling the Virtual PC 4 manual, the Cube is about 3 times faster than the 8500. We gave up on scrolling with the 8500 after 2 minutes when only about a fourth of the document had been scrolled. As stated previously, the 8500 with a 250 MHz 604e processor and 88 MB RAM was not intolerably slow for general use but noticeably slower than with Mac OS 9.0.4.

If you have a legacy Mac with a fast 604e processor and want to try Mac OS X, then we'd recommend you do so. Rempel's Unsupported UtilityX makes doing so very simple.

[Update] TechTool Lite 3.0.1 is Out: From Micromat's Jeff Baudin, "Just a note to let you know that we've released TechTool Lite v3.0.1. This software was originally known as the "freeware" version of TechTool. You and your readers should find this a very significant update. This is the first update in almost 2 years. Many new features are included. The file is available immediately at MacUpdate.Com. It will also be available directly from the download section of our site sometime on the afternoon of 6/21/01."