PowerTower Pro 225 with some upgrades

[joewhk]

I was surfing around a local Mac forum (I'm in Hong Kong) last night and spotted a post for giveaway of a "Power Computing Mac Clone" :O

The post was posted for about 15 minutes so I quickly replied him without a second thought. There wasn't any information on the specs of the machine at all except the owner says there's no hard drive. Well, at least the machine is functional.

So I picked up the machine today and... hmm, this is something more than just a PowerTower Pro 225. ;D



The first thing I noticed was... there's a missing plate for the PCI slots. Then I noticed that there's FireWire and USB ports... and there's an IDE card installed as well.



What's more, it got an ATi Graphics card which I'm not sure what exactly it is.



I booted the Mac with a Mac OS 8.1 installation disc. Not sure if that was a software bug or what because I'm using a Mac OS 8.1 Install disc for G3. However, System Profiler shows that I have a G3 4xxMHz Processor inside along with 272MB RAM inside :O

I'm not quite sure what's happening here but it seems that the previous owner is a hardcore user. He even left a Mandrake Linux 10.1 Installation disc inside the CD-ROM drive. Maybe I should quickly grab a second hand IDE hard drive and install the OS for more in-depth checking

 

[Schmoburger]

Nice conquering! I've always hoped to have one of the high end Power clones fall into my posession... alas however Ive only ever conquered the one which is a fairly midrange desktop model.

I am almost 100% certain that graphics card is a 16MB Rage128 PCI that was standard fitment to the Powermac G3 B+W and G4 Yikes towers....

Look familiar?

 

[joewhk]

AH! You're right! That's probably the card from G3... 8-o It has a VGA port only.

now... where is the original card? I don't even have the original keyboard and mouse :-/ and if the CPU is upgraded (which is very likely), I really wonder where are those cards... :?:

Let me get a hard drive this weekend and install a fresh copy of Mac OS 8.1

 

[Byrd]

Nice score, always nice to find a Mac with some nice upgrades in it too

Pretty sure that's an XLR8 Machcarrier G3 card - whatever CPU is in there is probably overclocked. They are probably the best G3 upgrade cards around.

 

[joewhk]

w00t! I didn't know much about the Mac clones before. It has the best G3 upgrade? Sounds really cool then!

I just remembered that there's a video capture card as well.



The previous owner left a Mandrake Linux 10.1 install disc inside. Given that it has an IDE card, I guess the previous owner used it for video editing or a file server.

 

[Schmoburger]

That Rage128 card isnt actually bad for what it's worth... I still use them in my G3 and G4 where they were stock items and video performance is quite adequate even under OSX. That said, if you wanted to grab a spice weasel and take things up a notch (BAM!!) you can get a Radeon 7000 or 9000 PCI Mac Edition card and and sqeauze every last bit of performance ya can out of it. The 9000 is available up to i believe a 128Mb model. Ive run the 32Mb 7000 however in a G3 and even that performs very nicely!

 

[joewhk]

I think I have a Radeon 7000 in my 8600, which was pulled from an Xserve.

System Profiler says it is running with a G3 427MHz Processor with 272MB RAM (64*4+8*2). Got Mac OS 9.1 installed but I'm not sure how to use the capture card yet. :-/

I'll try to install OS X with XPostFacto later Just thinking of which version to be installed - maybe Tiger, if not Cheetah.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Great nab, that's one of the few "Macs" that would tempt me right now. Had a desktop version at one time. but never a PCI clone tower, have fun.

What are the Cache amounts for the different levels on that card?

 

[Byrd]

With XPostFacto, just go for OS X 10.3 The 427Mhz CPU is probably a 400Mhz part with the bus speed slightly increased. I recall the PTP machines can run at quite a high bus speed (55 - 60Mhz), so you might want to experiment with the G3 at lower multiplier and higher bus speed in future.

JB