Once the build was complete, the software experiment can take place. Clearly for purely research reasons, Mac OS X is installed on the now reanimated Powermac.
The installation (Jas 10.4.8) is a breeze and pretty much everything worked without further fiddling. I've subsequently updated through 10.4.9 to 10.4.10. Provided you take a safe copy of the kexts in /system/library/extensions and copy them back (along with the kernel) before the update is allowed to reboot then all is fine.
Screengrabs to the right here show the results. Something is not quite right with the "About this Mac" dialogue as the RAM shows up as zero MHz... But, you can see that the Intel E4300 Core 2 Duo has been overclocked from its stock 1.8GHz. Unfortunately 2.16GHz seems to be the highest my el cheapo motherboard will allow!
And for the sake of legality, I proceeded to immediately wipe the HDD and install something else (although technically I am licensed given the old G4 had a legitimate copy of OS X!). Right.
I'm pretty pleased with the Xbench results as well (see below) although I know it is a tool not without its flaws.
