Speed up Blue&White G3

[woopud]

Right now it has a old 5400 rpm harddrive, what will be faster: new 7200 rpm HD or a SCSI card with scsi HD ?

Bert

 

[madmax_2069]

well seeing a B&W comes standard with a IDE HDD you might want to stick with that.

not saying a scsi HDD is slow (cause they are not)

BTW what rev is that B&W

 

[quinterro]

Right now it has a old 5400 rpm harddrive, what will be faster: new 7200 rpm HD or a SCSI card with scsi HD ?
Bert

Depends on how fast the SCSI drive is. A 7200rpm drive will improve the drive performance and would be a lot cheaper than the SCSI card and hard disk. Around Raleigh NC an 80GB drive retail is about $50.

 

[madmax_2069]

yea those 5400 RPM drives are a slug. i have a 7200 RPM WD 120 SE wich was a real boost in performance, from the old 4gb HDD that was in my Beige G3 AIO. i now got the drive in my DA.

like i forgot to say, but the above poster said. getting a SCSI PCI controller and a decent sized fast SCSI HDD will be allot compaired to a newer bigger and just as fast IDE HDD. i bought my 120gb HDD new in the box for $57 shipped from amazon.

 

[woopud]

well seeing a B&W comes standard with a IDE HDD you might want to stick with that.
not saying a scsi HDD is slow (cause they are not)

BTW what rev is that B&W

I assume it's the rev. 2 because it has three drive tray's on the bottom of the case. Guess i'll just get a new 7200 rpm hard drive then.

Bert

 

[bluekatt]

look at the controller chip lounging around somewhere near the brackets if there is 402 on the chip its a rev 2

 

[macintoshme]

If you are trying to speed up a blue and white ... I have a server running 10.4- here is what I did:

Turned off Dashboard

Turned off Spotlight

Other things you can do:

There is a program out there to turn off shadows called ShadowKiller ( taking less GPU) which makes things a bit snappier.

More ram helps alot

 

[woopud]

How do I turn off Dashboard and Spotlight ?

I never use them anyway.

Bert

 

[bluekatt]

terminal voodoo

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050723123302403

spotlight involves more crazy terminal voodoo http://www.tuaw.com/2005/05/13/tiger-tips-hate-spotlight-turn-it-off/

 

[Quadraman]

I wouldn't change over an IDE Mac to SCSI. The drives are usually more expensive and in smaller capacities. To gain some speed but lose capacity for more money isn't a good trade off IMO.

 

[bluekatt]

I wouldn't change over an IDE Mac to SCSI. The drives are usually more expensive and in smaller capacities. To gain some speed but lose capacity for more money isn't a good trade off IMO.

well he could plunk in a G4 cpu upgrade but that would be the same thing really

the best things he can do is max out the ram ( 1,5 gig ) or at least more ram

turn off dashboard and spotlight

get a better video card

and thats it

or take all that upgrade to a faster G4

think of what you will spend on all that and look in to a used G4 mini

unless off course he likes to have a blue yikes!

 

[Quadraman]

I wouldn't change over an IDE Mac to SCSI. The drives are usually more expensive and in smaller capacities. To gain some speed but lose capacity for more money isn't a good trade off IMO.

well he could plunk in a G4 cpu upgrade but that would be the same thing really

the best things he can do is max out the ram ( 1,5 gig ) or at least more ram

turn off dashboard and spotlight

get a better video card

and thats it

or take all that upgrade to a faster G4

think of what you will spend on all that and look in to a used G4 mini

unless off course he likes to have a blue yikes!

It's not really worth upgrading a B&W to modern standards at all if you want to take it that far. You can buy a newer Mac with higher specs and better expandability options for less money than you would spend on upgrades. A 1.6ghz G5 costs less than some G4 upgrades now.

 

[bluekatt]

thats what i mean

all he can do is turn dashboard and spot light off and look for a better video card everything else is just not worth it and far too expensive

the price of that dual 1.7 GHZ G4 i linked too is ridicilous you can buy a complete imac G5 for that

 

[MacJunky]

well he could plunk in a G4 cpu upgrade but that would be the same thing really

Unless I am mistaken if the G4 upgrade is past something like 500 or 600Mhz the bus has to be run at 66Mhz or something. G3s should be able to run high with no bus speed reduction. I think they make 1.1Ghz versions of both...

the best things he can do is max out the ram ( 1,5 gig ) or at least more ram

Blue&Whites can take a max of 1GB (256MB per slot) if I recall from the Rev 1 and Rev 2 that I own.

get a better video card

An original Radeon or Radeon 7000 is cheap.(try not to get a 7000 though, they are shit)There are other more expensive cards like the 9200 and I think some 5x00 series nvidia but those can get expensive.

 

[bluekatt]

1 gig it is

and it s not really about the speed of the machine the blue G3's have a 100 mhz bus

but about pumping too much money in old tech to keep it modern while modern better technology is availble for less money

yes he can up grade his memory to the max ( which can be expensive a 512 mb pc 100 module is 103 euro here ) plunk in a better video card and a monsterous cpu upgrade but even then that machine will never be able to stand up against a G5 tower or imac which are now both dirty cheap even cheaper then the combined price of all those upgrades

so more ram better video card ignore the cpu upgrades unless you have a bottemless wallet

 

[MacJunky]

I do not intend to start a flame war here but...

and it s not really about the speed of the machine the blue G3's have a 100 mhz bus

Yes, with all G3 CPUs of any speed and G4 upgrades less than 700Mhz.http://www.ehmac.ca/anything-mac/46292-larger-yikes-g4-heatsink-4-clip-version-b-w-g3-2.html#post474740

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=2765940#2765940

I do have to agree with you that because the fact that high end G4 ZIF upgrades are still rather expensive makes you wonder if you should not just go for a 600Mhz G4 or 1Ghz G3 if any CPU upgrade at all. Though, even a 500Mhz G4 or even 600Mhz G3 would help considerably over the stock CPU.

Just the fact that there is a bus speed reduction alone can hurt, the prices of the upgrades are akin to salt in one's wounds.

 

[Unknown_K]

I removed my g3-350/512k and put in a cheap g3-400/1mb and noticed a decent boost in performance. I have 750MB RAM (256x 2 128x2) and it runs very nicely.

I don't think the cost associated with the very high end g3/g4 ZIFF is worth it considering what a whole G4-1Ghz machine goes for these days (and they would have 133Mhz bus not 100 or 66 when using a fast g4).

 

[The Macster]

Though, even a 500Mhz G4 or even 600Mhz G3 would help considerably over the stock CPU.

Yes, I would very much recommend the 500 MHz G4 - I got one for my Beigey and it's awesome, so fast and now runs all the AltiVec stuff like iLife '08. They can sometimes go for crazy prices though, which they are not worth as you can buy a real Sawtooth for that kind of cash these days and run Leopard - I only paid £3.20 including postage for mine, which is still more than my whole Mac is worth!

 

[SiliconValleyPirate]

When I used to use my B&W regularly I dropped a 80GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 PATA drive in it with 8MB cache and it made a whole world of difference to the speed. Although PATA is nasty, having an onboard drive that's capable of even just matching the 33MB/s transfer rate of the ATA33 bus (which the original Maxtor and Quantum disks are not, by a mile) will greatly benefit the machine. If you are planning to get something for the longer haul, Id probably go with a PCI SATA card instead of SCSI as it's less expensive overall and you can more easily utilize new parts rather than used ones (most second hand SCSI drives are ex-server or ex-workstation and have been run into the ground). If you want the maximum benefit from SATA you need a 64-bit wide PCI card. These are available from a couple of Mac vendors but are expensive. 32-bit wide PCI cards will work just fine but you'll find you get a bit of a bottleneck on transfer speeds over a 33MHz 32-bit bus if you use more than one disk at once. This is partly due to the slow bus and partly the fault of the rather lame PCI bus design in the B&W. SATA also conveniently bypasses the awkward Rev 1 ROM/IDE issue.

RAM and CPU upgrades always help, whatever you fit. Mine is running a 500MHz/1MB G4/500 much like Macster's beige and it fairly whips along. I run Tiger quite happily on it with 768MB RAM. One major thing that makes it so good is the graphics card though. I use a Radeon 9200 PCI(66) Mac Edition card with 128MB DDR2 VRAM. It's not up to AGP speeds bus-wise but it will pretty comfortably out-perform something like a GeForce 2/4 MX in Mac OS X, purely because it has a ton more VRAM and the GPU is better.

For nice extras consider a decent FireWire card, as the onboard bus can't hack having 2 devices at once on it, and I believe Rev 1 machines are prone to very occasional data glitches. Also consider a good NEC-based USB 2.0 card. Remember though loading up the PCI bus with extra throughput will slow it down significantly. if you get them all talking at once. Realistically if you want external storage you would be better getting a SATA card with 2 extra E-SATA headers on and using that. That will load the SATA bus down a little but it will at least keep the cross-talk on the PCI bus to a minimum.

Hope that all helps