Help identifying unusual card in Beige G3 for sale.

[LaPorta]

Here is a photo of the one in my Power Tower Pro. The port says "DFP." Other than that, I have no idea what the port is. Drives the small 15" LCD I have well, though!

Mine is a little different; the shielding has a soft cover to it. Yours does not appear to,

 

[Franklinstein]

Though, you likely would want a bit of a better card to run an SGI 1600SW off of. I don't know off hand any other displays that used this standard.

Apparently, Compaq used to be a fairly high-end manufacturer in the 1990s (how the mighty have fallen), and they had a few digital flat panel displays that used the DFP standard; I don't recall ever seeing in person a display that uses DFP, though.

SGI may have used it, but I figure they used a proprietary connector of some sort, or at least a card better than a mediocre ATI card. I'm not really up on SGI stuff though; I never tried to get into them when they were available (I watched indifferently as many Indys and O2s reduced to scrap about 15 years ago), and now they're scarce and/or expensive. It's not like I need another lot of colorful boxes piled up in the corner, though, so I'm not too sad about it. The MIPS architecture and audio-capable DDS drives were the only reasons I would want any of them; I have about as much interest in their x86 boxes as I do Apple's.

 

[Cory5412]

SGI built their own GPUs for the O2, Octane, and the VW320/540 which were their machines paired with the 1600SW. On the Mac, a Number 9 Revolution was often used, and a few different cards (but mainly that one) were used on commodity PCs. SGI (and also Formac if I remember correctly) had what was called the multi-link adapter, which adapted from regular DVI to DFP.

Unless I'm reading the spec wrong -- it's possible I am and that DFP was on the MLA and not on the 1600SW itself.

Apparently, Compaq used to be a fairly high-end manufacturer in the 1990s

Oh yeah -- Compaq was honestly one of the PC OEMs to give IBM the best run for their money, their laptops tended to be on point and set up well, plus they'd acquired DIGITAL and were doing more or less a reasonable job with Alpha.

It's interesting though because I hadn't seen any DFP references when looking at that stuff, but Compaq (and later HP) favored ATi stuff at the end of the Alpha platform, so if it would've been anywhere, it stands to reason it would have been there.

a mediocre ATI card

Mediocre is the key word, but as an 8MB card, that card probably wasn't considered mediocre when it was new, it's just, not what I would've paired my SGI 1600SW with, is all. (My presumption here is that when it was new, an 8MB ATi Rage-class card would've been good for 2D work or perhaps then-modern 3d gaming, and so it's really a "just got a new-modern 20" CRT I'm running at over 1600x1200" for big spreadsheets" card, but it was around the late '90s that using very specialty GPUs started falling out of style in favor of, just, most software started to be faster on CPUs (only to start to fall back into favor at the end of the 200xs, but that's a different story.)

 

[EvieSigma]

The system came in today. It's definitely an ATI video card, but rather perplexingly, the motherboard also has a 4MB SGRAM upgrade. Dual monitors perhaps?

Also, the Zip drive (a SCSI one!) is gone, replaced with a Seagate SCSI hard drive. It's dated "0018", I didn't know they even still made 50pin drives in 2000. Will have to find out the capacity and its contents later, and take pictures. It's a really nice unit, no yellowing and the only broken plastic was the power button (fortunately my grungy parts G3 had a complete one). No CPU upgrade, sadly, but 300MHz is fine enough.

 

[Unknown_K]

I have a native 50 pin Seagate (I think its Seagate) 18GB 3.5" standard height HD on the shelf but they are kind of rare and made quite a bit after everybody switched to 68 pin drives.

Built in video is probably as fast or faster then same chip on a PCI  card and it fees up a slot if you need it for something else. So its a 4MB upgrade SIMM (6MB total VRAM)?

I believe all the ZIP drives on the Beige G3 are IDE from the factory. The only Apple SCSI ZIPs were in the older models like the PM6500 and probably PM9600 era.

 

[EvieSigma]

I guess the previous owner routed a SCSI cable to the Zip bay then as that's where the SCSI drive sits. It's either wiped or dead as there's no OS on it. Will have to throw in a boot CD tomorrow when I'm feeling more energetic to find out which one is true.

 

[EvieSigma]

Okay, back with pics. SCSI drive is a 4.5GB unit and working, it just wasn't initialized. This thing has a perfectly acceptable 384MB of RAM installed but what's really interesting is that the CPU shows up under System Profiler as 466MHz. 450MHz B&W CPU, perhaps?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I believe all the ZIP drives on the Beige G3 are IDE from the factory. The only Apple SCSI ZIPs were in the older models like the PM6500 and probably PM9600 era.

The Molar Mac version of the BG3 had SCSI Zips, IIRC that's where uniserver got a batch of them. If so, that's a bummer not to have found one in there. But you've got the Zip Bezel and an ATA-whatever card will ramp up disk performance and run a Zip 250 very nicely.

edit: nice sewing machine. :approve:

 

[Franklinstein]

Rev. A G3s all had SCSI Zip drives because the ROMs wouldn't support master/slave ATA configs; the only way to have more than two internal drives in a Rev. A G3 was SCSI.

Rev. A G3s had slightly slower built-in video than later models, but they also occasionally shipped with 83MHz-capable memory controllers. Apple was originally going to sell 83MHz versions of the G3 but ol' Steve put a stop to that. My fastest beige G3s are Rev. A boards with Rev. C ROMs (for improved performance and master/slave ATA) clocked to 83MHz with, upgraded processor, the A/V card, video, network, usb/FW, and SCSI (onboard SCSI is 5MB/sec max).

 

[EvieSigma]

The Molar Mac version of the BG3 had SCSI Zips, IIRC that's where uniserver got a batch of them. If so, that's a bummer not to have found one in there. But you've got the Zip Bezel and an ATA-whatever card will ramp up disk performance and run a Zip 250 very nicely.

edit: nice sewing machine. :approve:

There's a Compaq Portable 286 under the table on the right too.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Sweet, I've found a borken Compaq Portable II sitting on top of the garbage can outside of a thrift a LONG time ago. I hacked the case and KBD back then, but still have the boards. I may one day build a plexi home for the innards and try to get 'em to work again, dunno, not that much fun compared to my other projects.

On stayca for the week, in between coats of paint on the faux shoji screen frames I may try to unearth my BG3 BenchMac to see what the story is with it. That Rev C ROM upgrade sounds the bombe.

 

[EvieSigma]

How do you tell the ROM revision anyway? I have two -B boards with single-sided ROM SIMMs.

 

[Unknown_K]

You can use the Apple System Profiler to identify which ROM version you have:

• Rev. 1: $77D.40F2
  
• Rev. 2: $77D.45F1
  
• Rev. 3: $77D.45F2
  

 

[EvieSigma]

Well this is troubling, I installed Mac OS 9.1 on the SCSI drive, booted the computer today and the drive was no longer mounted. Looks like I'm switching to IDE sooner than I thought, because dismounting itself doesn't seem like healthy behavior for a SCSI drive.

 

[Unknown_K]

If you boot from the OS 9.x CD does the SCSI HD show up again?