A G4 Cube is like any other piece of vintage hardware: run the right software on it and it does its job well, but run the wrong software on it and it becomes a bottleneck.
A Cube is, for example, really, really fast running 9.1 (which is what it shipped with). The highest system it will run at all comfortably is X.4 (under which it is definitely best with 1.5GB RAM, a fan for ventilation, and a better video card than stock).
You get a good sense of what it is capable of from a standard office package. It struggles running MS Office 2008 (which runs, but rather like, say, Office 2001 does on a 6100). Running Office 2004, however, a Cube just flies.
So the moral of the story is, pop in a couple of very modest upgrades, drop a few million lines of code, and it will run smooth as silk.
A Cube is, for example, really, really fast running 9.1 (which is what it shipped with). The highest system it will run at all comfortably is X.4 (under which it is definitely best with 1.5GB RAM, a fan for ventilation, and a better video card than stock).
You get a good sense of what it is capable of from a standard office package. It struggles running MS Office 2008 (which runs, but rather like, say, Office 2001 does on a 6100). Running Office 2004, however, a Cube just flies.
So the moral of the story is, pop in a couple of very modest upgrades, drop a few million lines of code, and it will run smooth as silk.