Choosing a CPU upgrade for my Beige G3 266

[sunvalleylaw]

I have decided that I want my beige G3 desktop to be one of my flagship vintage machines. I just love the ugly old form factor, and the incorporation (first time for me) of color and CD-ROM. And that era was when I committed as a solo lawyer, to the Mac environment for my office, though I was using a '95 Performa, rather than a '98 PowerMac. I played around with Launch magazines, switched off Word to WordPerfect (and stayed there for years until Corel killed the Mac version later on) and played around with Myst on CD-Rom, though I never really solved the puzzle. (Going back to that now). And now, I want to incorporate early DAW and music production/recording with some vintage MIDI gear, and perhaps even use some of the musical work playing out, with a Powerbook 3400c I have (my next machine after my Performa). Will be looking for an accelerator or replacement motherboard for that 3400c also. I also will have a period correct Performa color CRT monitor to use as well.

Anyhow, I ran across a BUFFALO 500MHz G3 ZIF Upgrade 1MB Cache for Apple Power Macintosh, on the online auction site (please don't snipe me) and am considering it for my 266 MHz Beige G3. Anyone have any experience with this model or similar? It looks to be compatible. I will plan on also replacing/upgrading the fan and etc. I see there is also a POWERLEAP PL-G3/Z 500MHz G3 ZIF also available which might be a push and is around the same price but not sure about advantages/disadvantages. My Beige machine has an ATI Rage 128 from a B/W G3 already. It has 224 MB of RAM currently and a 6 GB IDE hard drive. I may end up putting in a BlueSCSI v.2 or just use an external one I have.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

 

[Phipli]

The 500MHz G3 will make a big performance difference. I haven't used that specific one, but I have a few faster G3 chips knocking around.

For your hard disk, I'd consider trying a StarTech IDE to SATA adapter and putting a 120GB SSD in there (don't bother going bigger, it just causes more issues). Make sure you keep your boot disks in the first 8GB though! There is an issue that makes it not like booting from past that. What I usually do is partition a disk something like...
1GB (8.1), 2GB (9.2.2) , 5GB 10.2(?) and then the rest of the disk for storage and applications.

Your graphics card is plenty good enough really - I actually find the Rage 128s run faster at 2D than the later cards like the 7000 or 9200.

A bit more RAM might be useful some late OS 9 games like to have a few hundred MB - you have to watch the height (G3s need low profile modules), and look for ones with lots of chips because they don't like "high density" chips, but they can be found! I got some 256MB PC133 modules that fit for only something like £5 a while back. They were Epson branded, perhaps out of a printer?

Remember to turn off the RAM test to save a bit of time during boot otherwise it will sit with a blank screen for about 45 seconds if you put 768MB in it.

Which perch card do you have? The AV ones can be fun for retro video and audio editing projects, but they can take a while to find at a good price.

 

[sunvalleylaw]

Which perch card do you have? The AV ones can be fun for retro video and audio editing projects, but they can take a while to find at a good price.

Thanks for that! Not sure. I am away from that machine for a few days so will have to look when I get back. Good thought!

 

[sunvalleylaw]

@Phipli Pretty sure it is just the stock Whisper.

 

[herd]

I suppose the ultimate CPU would be one of the ~1GHz G3 boards using a 750G chip, but I suppose you should go with whatever you can find these days. The ZIF adapter should let you try a few different CPU modules that are more common, including one of the G4 ZIF boards?

Good luck with your project and let us know how it goes!

 

[obsolete]

FWIW, there is a path to adding USB to your personality card thanks to @croissantking: https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/getting-g3-whisper-perch-usb-working.43681/

Saves a PCI slot for something else.

 

[joevt]

List of GPU upgrades for the Beige G3:
https://everymac.com/upgrade_cards/by_system/powermac_g3.html

The two most interesting seem to be these:
PowerForce G3 ZIF 1.1
Encore G4 1.0/1M

 

[Byrd]

I’ve got a Buffalo 500Mhz G3 in my beige G3, it’s the perfect match works well - once you go past this speed in early G3 desktops it’s a law of diminishing returns. Voodoo 2 would be a nice addition in one of the slots.

 

[sunvalleylaw]

I’ve got a Buffalo 500Mhz G3 in my beige G3, it’s the perfect match works well - once you go past this speed in early G3 desktops it’s a law of diminishing returns. Voodoo 2 would be a nice addition in one of the slots.

Great, thanks! The seller in Japan was helpful too and helped me feel confident that it would work well, so I pulled the trigger.

 

[AlpineRaven]

I have G4 500mhz ZIF waiting to go in... now you have encourage to do mine one!!!!
Cheers
AP

 

[Phipli]

One thing people might consider for experimentation (caveats apply) is overclocking the bus a bit. Some Beige Macs will run with an 83MHz bus which will improve RAM performance.

Your milage may vary and all that. Depending on your machine specifics, as well as RAM performance (I always overspec my RAM in these anyway since PC100 and 133 is so cheap anyway) and the CPU you're using. But if you have a CPU that also works in a Blue and White (with it's faster bus), and fast RAM, it's only the chipset that might hold you back

It might confuse the upgrade if it auto calculates it's bus multiplier though... Stock CPUs are set on the logic board, but Sonnets for example use onboard smarts to set it themselves and given there was no host that used 83MHz from factory, they might not be expecting it.

 

[Snial]

<snip> 500Mhz G3 <snip> once you go past this speed in early G3 desktops it’s a law of diminishing returns.

'tis always the way. The principle of locality usually holds true, which means that most computation takes place locally. So a faster CPU with larger L1 and L2 caches improves performance. However, the big shift towards processing masses of media over the past few decades pushes the performance improvement from accelerators closer to the speed of the underlying bus, main memory and I/O subsystem.

This is why, I guess, my PB1400c/166 (+128kB L2) is a welcome and noticeable speed increase from its earlier 117MHz (0 L2) CPU. But boot-up times and bandwidth intensive tasks (e.g. playing Quake or low-res MPEG2) isn't such an improvement due to its 33MHz bus and FPM DRAM. Generally speaking though it's not too far off my PowerMac 4400/160 as I remember it being in the late 1990s with its 40MHz bus, PCI and EDO RAM (and no L2).

 

[croissantking]

This is why, I guess, my PB1400c/166 (+128kB L2) is a welcome and noticeable speed increase from its earlier 117MHz (0 L2) CPU. But boot-up times and bandwidth intensive tasks (e.g. playing Quake or low-res MPEG2) isn't such an improvement due to its 33MHz bus and FPM DRAM.

I would argue it’s not specially the 33MHz bus, but more likely the 32-bit access to ROM/RAM (where most PPC are 64-bit), and the 25MHz 16-bit ‘030 peripheral bus (so disk access and frame buffer performance is hobbled). Architecturally these things were like a PowerBook 500 series with a PPC upgrade.

 

[GondolinOnMyMind]

One thing people might consider for experimentation (caveats apply) is overclocking the bus a bit. Some Beige Macs will run with an 83MHz bus which will improve RAM performance.

How does one overclock the bus speed?

 

[Phipli]

How does one overclock the bus speed?

There are 2mm jumpers on the logic board. From factory they have a fixed jumper block, but if you buy some 2mm jumpers (or pull the metal bits out of the block and move them into different positions) you can set the bus speed, clock multiplier and PCI multiplier.

Beige G3 Motherboard Clock Speed Jumper Settings

 

[croissantking]

There are 2mm jumpers on the logic board. From factory they have a fixed jumper block, but if you buy some 2mm jumpers (or pull the metal bits out of the block and move them into different positions) you can set the bus speed, clock multiplier and PCI multiplier.

I wanted to convert this into a DIP switch block but couldn’t find anything suitable to solder onto the footprint. I have little jumpers that I have to change with tweezers and sometimes they fly off into some corner of the case

 

[Phipli]

I wanted to convert this into a DIP switch block but couldn’t find anything suitable to solder onto the footprint. I have little jumpers that I have to change with tweezers and sometimes they fly off into some corner of the case

I use smooth jawed, square ended, mini needle nose pliers. Less prone to going *ping*.