PCI Power Macs Great for Mac OS X 10.2 and 10.3

- 2007.10.30

My Turn is Low End Mac's column for reader-submitted articles. It's your turn to share your thoughts on all things Mac (or iPhone, iPod, etc.) and write for the Mac web. Email your submission to Dan Knight .

The Power Mac 8600 provides a very cheap OS X capable machine. With a Sonnet Tech G3/500 upgrade or larger, the machine can easily run OS X Jaguar (10.2) with the aid of Sonnet's PCI X Installer. From that point, run XPostFacto 4 (which requires 10.2.8 to be running), and then install the Panther CD set.

Although it is possible to get Tiger to install, less of the programs that the OS will allow you to install will work when it comes down to it. It is true that even in Panther certain parts of the iLife suite that are dependent on large graphics operations will not function properly.

Panther, however, provides the 8600 with the speed of a more modern OS, a fully functional iChat AV, and more full FireWire support without the slowness of Jaguar or the incompatibility issue of Tiger's applications.

I will include pictures, later, of a G3 500 8600 running OS X Panther with only 140MB of RAM. Thanks, enjoy. Haack.

Editor's note: The Power Mac 7300-7600, 8500-8600, and 9500-9600, as well as several clones from SuperMac and Power Computing support 1 GB or more of memory, have 3 or more PCI slots, and the used same family of CPU "daughter cards", making them a popular choice for "unsupported" OS X installs. To learn more about running OS X on older Macs, join our Unsupported OS X List. dk

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