Why Panther? I've found, in a couple cases, that Tiger runs *much* faster on any given system than does Panther.
Best example is my Lombard 333; after I installed and updated (to 10.4.5 at the time), I found it was a lot more faster and more responsive than Panther.
I'm also enjoying my Cube (main machine) on Tiger; 450MHz, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, OS 10.4.11. It never lets me down.
Nice score. Congrats!