So last night, I pulled the logic board board back out of the SE/30 to have a closer look for damage and ascertain it's general condition prior to sending it for a recap. I beleive the degradation it suffered can be put down to a leaking C6 cap rotting a couple of feet on the ASC at UE10. Aside from that however, the board appears in remarkably good condition given the appalling state of the machine in other respects... ie the fact it looks like it was dropped from a Hercules. Assuming the chip at UE10 isnt rotted out underneath then hopefully this board should be an easy enough fix at the hands of somebody competent who can re-establish the connections from the chip. The AB caps actually look remarkably good, so that should be a simple matter of RnR.
Also, just because I unburied it, I figured I would grab a shot or two of the fabled G3.5...
Don't be fooled by the haggard appearance... It looks like garbage as it was rescued after becoming basically that. This machine has some history with me, hence why I took it the moment it was offered my way.
It started life at my high school in 1999 as a 350Mhz Rev.1 used as a student fileserver, being one of two blue G3's my school had for that purpose. In that capacity it served for some years until being replaced by a PC in around 2003. Not long after that, it was decided that we needed a far better computer for editing video etc on than the iMac DV we had been using (I had my finger in all aspects of the tech side back then as a student). Upon exploring our options, and seeing what sort of budget the school had to play with, we decided that our best bang for buck would be a full upgrade of the G3 we now had at our disposal just sitting around.
So after getting the go ahead from the teacher in charge of that side of things, we set about creating a monster... We ordered 1Gb of RAM, a Sonnet Encore G4 500Mhz ZIF upgrade, an R7000 32Mb Mac Edition, a Pioneer dual-format DVD burner, a 120Gb 7200rpm HDD, a PCI firewire and USB 2.0 card, and a bunch of great software including a brand sankers retail copy of Panther.
When the items arrived, we set to work turning the doorstop into a ripper machine again. Unfortunately it was at that point that we discovered the corruption issues suffered by Rev.1 B+W towers when most large aftermarket drives are fitted to the stock IDE bus. We temporarily hooked the drive up to the ZIP connector which worked ok and it ended up staying that way until the drive failed due to heat... lesson learned. Replacement drive and a PCI ATA card fixed that issue, but there were also stability issues all the time... it simply would not stay cool doing long hard rendering tasks, which I put down to the higher clock CPU , the pair of hard drives and extra heat generated by the R7000. We ended up just having the case cracked and blowing a pedestal fan through it during high load operations and that ungracefully solved our stability issues most of the time. After that however, it began to eat RAM... possibly a bad batch but in any case it was another pain in the ass. At that point, some more money had been made available to our cause, and a 1GHz eMac fitted into the budget by a whisker, so we cut out losses, and the G3.5 as it had become known, basically became a glorified toy that played our various Mac games wicked fast but otherwise a shining statement of complete and utter failure. It remained there gathering dust, mocking us until I finished high school.... but nonetheless I liked it. It was a cool machine in principal, and realistically mine ran in the same configuration for years. I just figured the Rev.1 logic board was flakier than I gave credit for or this machine was just a dud. That said, i found out from a fellow student and friend who came to work as an IT guy at the school after we graduated that apparently some monkey had unbeknownst to us had the heatsink off, smudged the goop off the CPU and that was what caused the overheating all along. By that time the machine was showing its age however and the school had all but stopped videoing anything after the performing arts side of things fell by the wayside.
Well, fast forward some years and my younger brother in his second attempt at 11th and 12 grade happened upon it again in a pile headed to the dumpster and rescued it in a poor state as you see it here. He tried fruitlessly to get it running, and eventually he stripped it all apart intending to build a PC into the case... fortunately this never happened due to the inability to find a suitable motherboard, and instead the machine sat until a couple of years ago when I took the haggard thing off his hands completely dismantled, knowing it had the Sonnet that I could use in my Yikes.
After some time, I was convinced I could get it booted with the usual G3 witchcraft, so set about piecing it back together, using Whatever PC screws I had in my box-o-screws to get it all back intact... hence the funny looking screws holding down the logic board... and a various assortment of other parts I had around to fill the gaps. eMac DVD burner, stock 350Mhz CPU out of my Yikes, whatever RAM i had floating round my bench, the old 10Gb HDD from my Yikes and whatever else I needed I found about the place. After a lot of percerverance as I expected (because it's a B+W), I got it to boot up and work perfectly, even overclocked the stock Yikes chip to 400Mhz.
Unfortunately I have slightly less PCI video cards than I have PCI Mac towers so it is a gnome at present, but I endeavour to find another R7000 for my other G3 and then this one can have it's graphics card back, and will probably be a candidate for a crystal side mod with paintstripped G4 side plastics and handles .
Oh and as an aside... the IIvx decided to die out of the blue yesterday, so now I am about to pull it down and see what da heeell is going on in there.
