Blue and White G3!!

[IIsi]

I Liberated a B&W G3 yesterday. Except for some outer case dust, it is flawless....it looks like it came out of the box. G3 300, 512MB of PC133, 80+14GB Hard drives, and a 16 MB Rage pro. Anyone have suggestions for a CPU upgrade or a video card upgrade? I'd like to play Unreal Tournament (the first one) on this. I've been using it to relive my Marathon days. It sure as hell looks a lot better in Millions of colors mode. lol. Also, the memory controller, the MPC106 Grackle chip, has some rose colored discoloration starting on it (the die is exposed) Does this need a heatsink? It is hot to the touch while the machine is on. Thanks.

 

[sambapati87]

You shouldnt need an upgrade to run Unreal Tournament -- I played it all the time on a 400mhz iMac with an 8mb Rage with no problems at all.

 

[Rodus]

You can overclock the CPU

http://lowendmac.com/macdan/02/0710ek.html

I've always overclocked my G3's with no problems whatsoever. If you don't mind spending a little bit of cash then a Mac Edition Radeon card is a nice bit of kit too (not the underpowered Radeon 7000).

 

[IIsi]

Oooh, overclocking. Neat. Well, maybe I'll try that. Can I get G4 zif upgrades for this thing? Also, I might hit the Radeon suggestion, the rage pro doesn't seem up to task to play Unreal at 1024x768. It skips. Also, a card that supported antialiasing would be nice but might be asking too much for this old boy.

 

[kissmyash933]

IIsi, Congrats! I'm using my Rev. 1 B/W as my Server, It runs solid as a rock!

The computer was originally a 300 MHz but i got mine all the way up to 400, good luck on your gaming!

Blake.

 

[coius]

you might want to take a look at PCI-Extreme which would allow Quartz Extreme on the Radeon. Or rather, any card that has an AGP Counterpart that can do Quartz Extreme.

I have archived in here:

Useful apps for OS X/OS 9

 

[Rodus]

The Radeon will support Anti aliasing on older games. You can also get G4 zif upgrades, see here.

Be careful though, the G3 300 will have the dreaded Rev 1 motherboard which was notoriously glitchy with IDE harddrives and stories of data corruption and incompatibility abound. Before spending a small fortune on a G4 cpu, it may be better to get a cheap quicksilver G4 which would also give you AGP, a higher RAM ceiling and much overall higher performance.

It's also worth remembering that unless you are using OS X or apps that benefit from Altivec then the G3 is actually a tiny bit faster then the G4.

 

[Bunsen]

Note also that the very fastest G4 upgrades available (800-1GHz) will downclock your bus speed from 100MHz to 66MHz. That and they cost more than a semi-decent G4 tower, which will give you the advantages Rodus points out, as well as having much faster and/or cheaper CPU upgrades available.

The optimum starting point for G4 towers IMHO is the Digital Audio (466 or 533MHz). They take the exact same CPU upgrades, RAM and video cards as all the other G4s (with some exceptions), have a 133MHz bus, 2x AGP video and four PCI slots.

In my mind the best bang for buck upgrades for that tower of yours, in order, are

• RAM
• Overclocking
• Video card (which, being PCI, will again be somewhat more expensive than an AGP equivalent)
• Faster, larger, quieter hard drive
• A used G4 ZIF to around 500MHz
• A new G3 ZIF to 1GHz
• A faster ATA or SCSI card.

Of course, you'd have to weight each upgrade's cost against the cost of a better base machine yourself.

 

[Bunsen]

rage pro

Ugh. Didn't these come standard with PCI Rage 128s? If not, and you don't want to splash out on a Radeon or better, pick one up. They're dirt cheap and worth every penny

Try for one with the black heatsink - I forget what the actual difference is, but they're more betterer for some reason. And there's a hardware DVD decoder daughtercard which is worth keeping an ear out for as well. OTOH, a Radeon can do that all on its lonesome.

unless you are using OS X or apps that benefit from Altivec then the G3 is actually a tiny bit faster then the G4.

Not sure that's literally true - I thought they were identical in performance at the same clock speed when the G4's Altivec intructions aren't being used.

Certainly in terms of bang for dollar, the same priced G3 would be faster in non-Altivec situations.

Also note Apple put in a eeeeebil firmware block to stop you installing (Apple branded ie second hand) G4 ZIFs in those towers, and you'll need to look up the software trickery to overcome it. It's not complex.

 

[IIsi]

Thanks for all the suggestions guys, but I have a deal that I might not be able to pass up. Someone I know may sell me their 500 Mhz Pismo!!!!! omfg. I've wanted one of those for a while and I think that's the fastest one. If this goes through, I may or may not keep the G3 tower. Let me know if anyone might be interested in it. I dunno. No idea what is happening, after years of no macs but my IIsi, all of a sudden the PowerPC is coming back to slap me across the face.

 

[Rodus]

@Bunsen, the 128's without the black heatsink were, IIRC, 128 GL's, the ones with the heatsink were 128 Pro's and had faster RAM and clock speeds.

I think that photoshop filters that are not Altivec enabled will often run slightly quicker on the G3.

 

[madmann]

my b&w has a 700 mhz g4 and a radion 9200 pci, it is running 10.4.11 and it is ok and still used daily by my wife for storing "her pictures". it surfs the web etc

ps up the memory to 1 or 2 gig max it out

 

[Unknown_K]

The B&W was shipped with rage pro's also:

"Some educational units came with a Rage Pro video card that supported video capture"

http://www.lowendmac.com/ppc/blue-white-power-mac-g3.html

My 1st B&W came with one, won't work well with OSX 10.3.

 

[Christopher]

my b&w has a 700 mhz g4 and a radion 9200 pci, it is running 10.4.11 and it is ok and still used daily by my wife for storing "her pictures". it surfs the web etc
ps up the memory to 1 or 2 gig max it out

I think 1GB is the max.

 

[Unknown_K]

256MBx4 (1GB) low density (double sided) DIMMS, plenty of RAM for a G3 I would think.

 

[Bunsen]

PC-100 or PC-133, nothing later than that. And double sided only if they are 256MB sticks - anything smaller than that will read fine.

Meanwhile - PISMO!!!!

 

[IIsi]

Yeah the Pismo fell thru, the kid wants more than I have at the moment. So G3 it is for a while. I am going to try and change the clock speed to 400 Mhz, and see what happens.

 

[Bunsen]

I'd redo the heatsink paste first if I was you

 

[LCGuy]

rage pro

Ugh. Didn't these come standard with PCI Rage 128s? If not, and you don't want to splash out on a Radeon or better, pick one up. They're dirt cheap and worth every penny

The normal G3s that they sold to you or me came standard with Rage 128's. however, according to MacTracker, some were sold with an Xclaim VR. (which means Rage Pro if its an Xclaim VR 2.0, Rage IIc if its an Xclaim VR 1.0 (unlikely))