I discovered PrimeGrid about a year ago with an iMac which at the time was a few months old. Then, and now, it runs PG fine (although it is outclassed today by far for GPU work). At some point I thought I'd try attaching my much older mac cube (G4, 450Mhz), which until then had been running seti@home for years. It downloaded only CW Sieve work and I had the same experience as you... it was way too slow, and would not meet deadlines. I gave up on that machine and stick with newer Intel and AMD boxes. Sorry, no good news here.

As for the "blue vs. green" issue, I don't think that's a problem. The processes that actually do the crunching normally run "nice", and that's the blue color. It's not extra overhead. The "green" processes are the real overhead, like the boinc manager itself.

--Gary

Hi, I used to run a G4 PowerMac, and although I ported the GCWSieve app, it doesn't perform well compared to the Intel Macs (or Win/Linux), especially now that we have GPU Sieving, it doesn't appear to be worth the effort.

Your best bet is running PPS tests on PRPNet using the phrot application, which does pretty well on the G4.

Cheers

- Iain