Got a Power Macintosh G3 Desktop, what is it???

[Jinnai]

I recently got a PM G3 desktop and I was wondering about upgrades for it and also how to get an OS installed on it most effectively. It currently has a 1GB HDD, but it doesn't boot and according to everymac it isn't the original, so I'm wanting to replace it, but what is the best replacement for it? There's SCSI, onboard IDE, IDE on a PCI card, or maybe SATA in a PCI card, if thats not a waste of resources...

Here's what I'm working with.

1) Whats the fastest hard drive/SSD option I can get for it?

2) Why is there a spot on the motherboard with 34 pins marked "floppy"?

3) Is there a version of the motherboard that can use the "Cache" slot thats blank on this board?

4) What is that little SODIMM looking port by the video circuitry?

5) Does anyone here have a couple 128MB low profile RAM modules I can use? I only have high-profile ones.

6) Whats going on with the personality card and why does it have so many open ports? Can I upgrade it?

Here's the PCI cards I have to work with, I don't know if any are useful for this Mac or not:

There's a Promise Ultra100, a Promise SATA150, and a Silicon Image SataLink sil3112.

 

[joshc]

Unfortunately I know very little about these models, so I'm not going to be any of help in terms of your questions but I just wanted to post to say, a little historical tidbit on this model, this is a cool Mac to own because I believe this is the first Power Macintosh model launched under Steve Jobs / Jon Rubenstein's helm - (I can't remember where the G3 AIO falls in the timeline but I am pretty sure that was being worked on before Jobs/Rubenstein were in control of product development...) the desktop G3 was a really successful model as far as I know and Apple desperately needed it after being crushed by the  more competitively priced clones at the time. I'm not sure how many they sold exactly, they seem hard to come by now, there's a couple on eBay but priced a little high. With this model Apple also returned to better packaging again, I think these came in a white box with a color photo of the desktop G3 on the front, and a blue accessories box inside.

Good luck with your upgrades

 

[Bolle]

1) Whats the fastest hard drive/SSD option I can get for it?

Any cheap SATA SSD probably is the most economical way, seeing that you already have two SATA cards at hand right there.

2) Why is there a spot on the motherboard with 34 pins marked "floppy"?

I think that's a leftover from the intention to build a CHRP compliant system with clones already in mind. The board also has a Jumper to switch between support for a Mac or standard ATX power supply.

3) Is there a version of the motherboard that can use the "Cache" slot thats blank on this board?

Not sure if that ever was a thing. The G3 and G4 ZIF modules have their own fast cache.

4) What is that little SODIMM looking port by the video circuitry?

Video memory. It takes standard SGRAM SO-DIMMs I think.

 

[Jinnai]

Unfortunately I know very little about these models, so I'm not going to be any of help in terms of your questions but I just wanted to post to say, a little historical tidbit on this model, this is a cool Mac to own because I believe this is the first Power Macintosh model launched under Steve Jobs / Jon Rubenstein's helm - (I can't remember where the G3 AIO falls in the timeline but I am pretty sure that was being worked on before Jobs/Rubenstein were in control of product development...) the desktop G3 was a really successful model as far as I know and Apple desperately needed it after being crushed by the  more competitively priced clones at the time. I'm not sure how many they sold exactly, they seem hard to come by now, there's a couple on eBay but priced a little high. With this model Apple also returned to better packaging again, I think these came in a white box with a color photo of the desktop G3 on the front, and a blue accessories box inside.

Good luck with your upgrades

Thanks, that's interesting information!

Any cheap SATA SSD probably is the most economical way, seeing that you already have two SATA cards at hand right there.

Video memory. It takes standard SGRAM SO-DIMMs I think.

Will an SATA SSD be bottlenecked by the PCI bus? 

For video memory, does this look like it would work? https://www.ebay.com/itm/143566116522

 

[Bolle]

Will an SATA SSD be bottlenecked by the PCI bus? 

Totally. That's why I said opt for one of the really cheap SSDs as they will still saturate the PCI bus with ease.

The video memory looks good to me.

 

[Jinnai]

What about the audio card, are there any options to get video input with it?

Does anyone want to do a Zip drive delete on their g3  

 

[IlikeTech]

I have a spare zip bezel I think, you need one?

 

[jeremywork]

Whats going on with the personality card and why does it have so many open ports? Can I upgrade it?

There are a handful of different variants of the G3 personality cards, which are sorted into three main versions:

1. "Whisper" cards had external 3.5mm jacks for standard audio in and out.

There were two main layouts for the whisper cards: one has a 40-pin header for the G3 All-in-one's front panel controls as well as internal 10-pin analogue video out connector for the monitor of the G3 All-in-one models. The other design supplies the 26-pin connector which is actually compatible with front panel/IR boards from earlier 5xxx/6xxx models but which was never utilized in any shipping G3 model. Not all boards populated all components of the layout. There appear to be unpopulated headers for TV or TV/FM tuners on both variants of the whisper card (as well as a 34-pin header I don't recognize on the non-AIO version,) but I have not heard of anyone trying to use a tuner with a whisper card, only with wings cards.

2. "Wings" cards had external connectors for composite and S-Video in and out, stereo RCA in and out, as well as 3.5mm jacks for standard audio in and out. These had an internal 60-pin DAV port for use with accessories such as the AVID cinema PCI, same port as on the video-in upgrade boards for the 5400/5500/6360/6400/6500/TAM, or on the logic boards of the 7200/7500/8500/8600.

Similarly to whisper cards, there are two different design variants of the Wings card. One variant supplies the same unused 26-pin IR/front panel connector for the 5xxx/6xxx, along with a 10-pin connector for the TV tuner or TV/FM combo tuners used in the 5xxx/6xxx, again never used in any shipping G3 model. The other variant of the wings card supplies an internal 10-pin analogue video out connector for the monitor of the G3 All-in-one models, along with the 40-pin header for the All-in-one's front panel controls. This design also permits use of the TV tuner or TV/FM tuner, but to my knowledge this function was not populated on the variants with populated AIO ports. They can be populated by hand and tuners are known to function (https://web.archive.org/web/20071104111656/http://www.geocities.com/pm9600g4/g3tv-1.html). In general, not all boards populated all components of either layout.

3. "Bordeaux" cards were externally identical to wings cards, but included onboard MPEG DVD decoding and supplied none of the "bonus" internal headers found on the wings cards.

• All variants of the G3 personality card also provided a modified Comm Slot II interface which only worked with Apple's 56k CSII modem (I think one by GV too, but no ethernet cards,) which would disable the onboard serial port when populated (same behavior as previous CSII machines.) There were two versions of the sticker surrounding the ports on each variant, so that the port icons would be upright on both tower models and desktops/AIOs (all shared the same logic boards, but there were two logic board revisions- off the top of my head I seem to recall the video subsystem was improved among other things.)

Here are pictures of the three cards I find most appealing upgrade-wise. To be clear, there is no factory mount for either tuner or IR board, but if you're creative it's a fun upgrade. No components have been added to either of the wings cards (yet)- they can be found this way in the wild.

 

[Brett B.]

My favorite upgrades for a beige G3 are a USB card, 10/100 ethernet, and a faster video card (Radeon 7000 is easy to find and inexpensive.)  That will use up all of your PCI slots.  I have IDE 120GB hard drives in both of mine, via the onboard controller.  SCSI2SD using the onboard SCSI controller would be another good option.

A PCI SCSI, ATA or SATA controller would probably offer better performance than the onboard ones but it burns up a PCI slot that can be better utilized for other purposes.

 

[waynestewart]

Those don't look Mac cards to me and usually a Mac won't boot off am PC card.

 

[Michael_b]

There's a Promise Ultra100, a Promise SATA150, and a Silicon Image SataLink sil3112.

Those don't look Mac cards to me and usually a Mac won't boot off am PC card.

the two cards with Promise chipsets are likely not bootable, but the Silicon Image SIL3112 card should be bootable (will need a firmware flash).

 

[Cory5412]

The original disks in these machines are dying quickly, which is probably why a rando 1-gig disk was installed. If that works, you can get started with it.

Or: you could also hook up a working IDE disk to the built in IDE port  on the computer. You'll need to find a disk under 128 gigs, and if you intend to boot Mac OS X on it, OS X must be installed on the first partition, and that partition must be smaller than 8GB. I don't think that applies to Mac OS 9, but I haven't put a reliable bigger-than-8 gig disk in my own beige g3.

You could also do an IDE to CF adapter.

Pop an OS install CD in and you should be off to the races. 9.2.2 runs really well on Beige G3s!

A note on faster storage: Mac OS is bad software no matter how good the hardware you have it on is and so while you do get convenience and some speed benefits from better storage, I don't know if you'll get enough to make it worth doing purely for the speed boost aspect. Faster storage would be beneficial if you were capturing video, and big disks would be beneficial if you wanted to use this machine as a file server for your other Macs. You can attach up to 2TB disks to a SATA or USB card and share them out with built-in filesharing, or AppleShare IP, depending on whatever struck your mood. (I was considering running vtools on my beige G3 before I got the QS'02.)

The Beige also has a SCSI bus so you could attach a normal Mac SCSI hard disk, it should work with SCSI2SD v5 or v6 (v6 would be preferable, the G3 is fast enough for it to almost certainly make a difference), a server HD w/ adapters or you could put a Mac ROM SCSI card and a SCSI HD with the right cabling, all depending really on what you have, what's easy to find and what you want out of it.

 

[Jinnai]

I have a spare zip bezel I think, you need one?

Sure! I'd like the whole zip drive setup eventually.

My favorite upgrades for a beige G3 are a USB card, 10/100 ethernet, and a faster video card (Radeon 7000 is easy to find and inexpensive.)  That will use up all of your PCI slots.  I have IDE 120GB hard drives in both of mine, via the onboard controller.  SCSI2SD using the onboard SCSI controller would be another good option.

A PCI SCSI, ATA or SATA controller would probably offer better performance than the onboard ones but it burns up a PCI slot that can be better utilized for other purposes.

Alright, I'll keep an eye out for a Radeon 7000! Would a 7200 work with system 8? I don't know much about it, never messed around with it much.

The original disks in these machines are dying quickly, which is probably why a rando 1-gig disk was installed. If that works, you can get started with it.

Or: you could also hook up a working IDE disk to the built in IDE port  on the computer. You'll need to find a disk under 128 gigs, and if you intend to boot Mac OS X on it, OS X must be installed on the first partition, and that partition must be smaller than 8GB. I don't think that applies to Mac OS 9, but I haven't put a reliable bigger-than-8 gig disk in my own beige g3.

You could also do an IDE to CF adapter.

Pop an OS install CD in and you should be off to the races. 9.2.2 runs really well on Beige G3s!

A note on faster storage: Mac OS is bad software no matter how good the hardware you have it on is and so while you do get convenience and some speed benefits from better storage, I don't know if you'll get enough to make it worth doing purely for the speed boost aspect. Faster storage would be beneficial if you were capturing video, and big disks would be beneficial if you wanted to use this machine as a file server for your other Macs. You can attach up to 2TB disks to a SATA or USB card and share them out with built-in filesharing, or AppleShare IP, depending on whatever struck your mood. (I was considering running vtools on my beige G3 before I got the QS'02.)

The Beige also has a SCSI bus so you could attach a normal Mac SCSI hard disk, it should work with SCSI2SD v5 or v6 (v6 would be preferable, the G3 is fast enough for it to almost certainly make a difference), a server HD w/ adapters or you could put a Mac ROM SCSI card and a SCSI HD with the right cabling, all depending really on what you have, what's easy to find and what you want out of it.

Thanks for the info! I like collecting machines more than software, so the way I look at it, if I wanted an OS X machine, I'd simply get another computer for it. I'd like to run System 8 or 9 on it, whichever is faster. I don't collect too many IDE HDDs under 160gb unfortunately, but I might be able to find a server SCSI drive. I know I have the adapter. There's a lot of options apparently, I just know the Performa 6230cd was painfully slow at IDE HDD reading and I'd like to somehow avoid that - if the software or the PCI bus make that happen no matter what then I'll use an IDE drive.

Thank you so much for all the info @jeremywork! Now I know to keep an eye out for one of those Bordeaux cards.

 

[Brett B.]

Alright, I'll keep an eye out for a Radeon 7000! Would a 7200 work with system 8? I don't know much about it, never messed around with it much.

I honestly don't know.  I imagine there are drivers that will work in 8.6, less likely in 8.5, much less likely in 8.1.  ATI drivers have some quirks, especially if you get into flahed PC video cards and stuff like that.

All that said, I can't imagine many scenarios where you would want to run anything less than 9.2.2 on a G3.  It is very snappy on mine at 433MHz and 768MB RAM... even if you had a 233MHz CPU and 256MB RAM, it should run acceptably well.  The only time I could see using OS 8 would be if you had a particular piece of software that does not work in OS 9.

 

[jeremywork]

Thank you so much for all the info @jeremywork! Now I know to keep an eye out for one of those Bordeaux cards.

Gladly! 

Do note that if you have plans to add a later ATI video card on PCI, most of them also contain DVD decoding hardware (the earliest ones required a daughercard for this.) I believe the Bordeaux card is the only way to get DVD video output from the onboard video port (saving all three PCI slots.)

 

[Jinnai]

Will the M3979 be unable to use a drive bigger than 120gb at all, or only be able to see 120 of it? I looked in my drive stash, and I had 2x 160gb, one 250gb, and one 320gb IDE drives, but nothing smaller, so I'll have to either buy a smaller IDE drive or get a PCI card.

 

[cheesestraws]

I'd imagine you should be fine to use the first 120G of a larger drive.  That's the usual pattern, anyway...