Upgrading RAM on Power Mac G5

[DavidB_ 83]

Dear All,

I have recently been downloading a lot more SC4-related files, and my Power Mac G5 has slowed down a lot more whilst playing. I use a dedicated account to run SimCity, and log out of all others in order to play. The two speed issues I have had are slower city loading times (which hasn't bothered me too much), but the issue which has bothered me is that the game sometimes freezes when I plop lots or drag networks, although it does recover. Would upgrading the RAM be of any help? I wouldn't want to spend too much on it, as the computer is slowly coming to the end of its useful life...

My computer (playing SimCity 4 on dedicated account, logging out all others...)

Power Mac G5 (June 2003) - Dual 2.0GHZ

1.5GB RAM at present

250GB Hard Drive

If you would like to know anything else, please ask... Thanks in advance for your help.

[Hamish 1,369]

That depends, how many downloads have you been downloading?

That would have been a fairly decent computer back in its day, I remember my eMac of around the same time had around 700Mb RAM and a processor of 1 GHz. Now that was difficult to run SC4 on!

Umm, its up to you whether or not you want to put more RAM in. It would do something, but then you would download more things, and then lose what ever was gained by the extra RAM. SimCity is unfortunately a game that just loves to take all the processing power out of your computer, and downloading more plugins, and expanding your cities is how it runs your computer dry.

It will help, but its effectiveness might be short lived, however I am not going to tell you what you should do in this situation. If this is the computer that you use to do everything, then I would expect a PowerMac to have a lot more than 1.5 GB of RAM, although impressive from 2003. Take the price into consideration too, and decide if this is worth it or not.

[DavidB_ 83]

That depends, how many downloads have you been downloading?

That would have been a fairly decent computer back in its day, I remember my eMac of around the same time had around 700Mb RAM and a processor of 1 GHz. Now that was difficult to run SC4 on!

Umm, its up to you whether or not you want to put more RAM in. It would do something, but then you would download more things, and then lose what ever was gained by the extra RAM. SimCity is unfortunately a game that just loves to take all the processing power out of your computer, and downloading more plugins, and expanding your cities is how it runs your computer dry.

It will help, but its effectiveness might be short lived, however I am not going to tell you what you should do in this situation. If this is the computer that you use to do everything, then I would expect a PowerMac to have a lot more than 1.5 GB of RAM, although impressive from 2003. Take the price into consideration too, and decide if this is worth it or not.

I'm pretty sure I haven't got half as many mods, lots and other files as most users!!! I used to run it on a 2001 Power Mac G4 867MHZ, and then a 1.25GHZ PowerBook G4, but at the time I didn't have any custom content on the game... I'm not planning on spending much, if anything, some extra RAM would be useful for everything, but tbh, I'm saving up to build a PC when Intel's Ivy Bridge is launched (Spring 2012, I believe). I have always prefered using Macs, but the things that SimCity doesn't do on the Mac is annoying; proper Intel support, not BAT tools, no .dll files (ExtraCheats) etc. I bought a PC version for £10 to use the BAT/Lot Editor, so I'm going to transfer eventually... I'd like to try games like Cities XL, that require more powerful computers than I have...

Thanks for your advice anyway