Sorry for being late to this party ...
🙂
I have three Macs running BOINC: a Mini, PowerMac G4 and PowerMac G5. BOINC runs perfectly well with several clients tried: v5.2.13, v4.4.5, I have tried on all comps the "full versions" and the minimal versions.
It is the projects which are probs: not all have Mac-clients. I am running predictor@home (want to help with some protein folding), Einstein@Home, Seti@Home. All these run perfectly well and stable.
For the Seti@home client I run a optimized application, which uses all the altivec optimizations there are and a seti-WU is crunched in 38% of the time compared to the standard client. This is a real speed up - since the application uses all the math-functions built into the processor and the compilers ... There is no optimized client for the Mac (well there is one, but I (personally) do not trust it - it crashed all my Macs), but you still get some quite decent credits ...
Rosetta works quite well too, but the ooomph is not there: somehow it kind of "took for ever" to crunch'em: on a PC A64 3000+ a WU took some 3 hours; the same WU could take 10 hours to crunch on the PowerMac G5 (2.0 MHz); OK, it crunched 2 WUs at a time, but still - I got very much more fun from Seti@home.
I have tried some other projects on the PowerMac G4 - but not under OS X but under Linux. That ran good, but slow.
I would propose that a Mac-system with a G4 or G5 processor, using OS X 1.3.x or 1.4.x is best utilized when usin BIONC 5.2.1x, with seti@home, with the altivec-enabled application.
BTW, I found my thread about the Mac-Seti-application!
I hope this helps ... if not please feel free to post. I am very busy this week, but I'll try to check in now and then ...
