Should I upgrade my G3; some reasons...


macrumors 601
Original poster
Feb 27, 2005
Here's the situation...

My G3 iMac DV (450MHz, 320 MB SDRAM) is running 10.3.9 right now. The thing is, it's running great! Everything's very fast, to the point where it's surprising me (for a G3 that is - it's as fast as my G4 for light duty stuff). My question is, is it worth the upgrade to Tiger to get the new features, and maybe some bugs and/or slower performance; or stay at 10.3.9 and enjoy the solidness and speed without some of the cool features in Tiger. I know that the G3 can't handle a lot of Tiger's features, so, it seems almost pointless to me. Even in Panther, I don't get the cube for fast user switching, although Exposé works fine.

BTW, it doesn't have a DVD drive (I broke the original DVD-ROM drive when I forced a business card CD in its slot loading drive back in early 2003. I then replaced the broken drive with just a CD-ROM drive), so I would have to install using Firewire or my iPod.

Anyway, what would you guys do?


macrumors 68030
Dec 26, 2002
Albuquerque, NM
Duff-Man says...if it is all working well to your satisfaction and the new features in 10.4 are not important to you, then keep your money. I don't believe however that a 10.4 upgrade will give you any "slowdown" - you may actually see a bit of a boost in performance (not a lot though)....oh yeah!


macrumors 68000
Nov 11, 2004
Don't bother wasting your money.
I tried Tiger on my G3 iBook and G3 iMac and was it ever crap
the best performance I have on those machines is through 10.3.9
stick with it.
I am not at all happy with Tiger. It slowed my machines down quite a bit.
slower than they were in Jaquar. I did clean installs on both so it was not that.
The widgets are fun but really nothing that cant be replaced by something as good or better.
Oh and a lot of the older games don't run at all under tiger.

James Philp

macrumors 65816
Mar 5, 2005
Tiger running fine on my PB G3 500 Pismo 384MB RAM. I don't get any of the iCandy either, but meh! To me, doing normal stuff like surfing etc. feels quicker in Tiger, and I would recommend it.
It depends a lot on RAM I think, especially with slower CPUs. 384 I would say is the bare minimum. I am considering a RAM and HD upgrade for this machine to take it through the next couple of years.