The $10 Beige G3 Minitower to close out the year.

[John8520]

I'm out of town for the holidays, and the past few days have been slow. Checked local listings for anything interesting, and sure enough, $10 G3 MT only about 20 minutes away on LetGo. Drove out and picked it up this morning, haven't tested it yet (all my gear is at the house) but it's in excellent condition with no dust.

Photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/IdSIxCwKemrlasL43

If the info on the back panel is to be believed, it's a 266 with 6GB drive, 24x CD, Zip100, and wings card. There's a 128MB Apple stick and two matching 32MB sticks. The hard drive is original in the above-PSU mount, which is nice to have, my previous MTs were missing this mount and had to use a front bay. It has 6MB VRAM total, but I'm not sure if the GPU is the Rage II+ or the newer Rage Pro. The date on the serial sticker is 6/10/1998, and EveryMac says that they switched to the Rage Pro in May '98 but I haven't found those reports to be completely reliable.

I plan to clock it to 300MHz, bump it to at least 384MB with stuff I have lying around, then maybe put a Rage 128 in it if the internal GPU can't drive 1280x1024. Probably run 8.1 or 8.6 on it.

 

[denodster]

great find, I've got one of these with a 500mhz g4 upgrade from powerlogix, I do all of my retro dev work on it. having both IDE and SCSI is nice because I can put a large hard drive in it without needing to search too hard, and I can still hook up all of my scsi stuff as well.

 

[John8520]

Yeah, the original PowerMac G3s make great bridge machines. Reliable, cheap, available, and has old and new interfaces to get you by.

 

[Unknown_K]

I really like my G3 MT, passed on a second one at a recycler because he wanted $30 for it ages ago and regret it. For some reason I don't get into the desktop versions and I have 3 of those.

 

[John8520]

Had a chance to sit down tonight and get it working. Took a little bit of doing, didn't want to show video for a bit. Had to re-seat the wings card, RAM, CPU, ROM, etc. Put a fresh battery in it, and pressed the CUDA button about a thousand times. Put a 256 and two 128s for a nice round 512, installed a fresh copy of 9.2.1. 9.1 was installed previously but had no data/apps on it, just a base install. HDD works, but is a bit slow and makes a lot of noise, so it may not be long for this world. I'll try and run it out, though.

I did put the B&W's Rage128 in it, and I have a USB card I'll add as well for peripheral's sake. Other than that, it's an awesome box for $10!

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Can't get that Zip bezel for $10 anywhere! Sweet find, enjoy.

 

[John8520]

Yeah, the condition of the plastics overall is really stunning, the only thing it's missing are the feet (which I have replacements for somewhere) and it seems like they often fall off mac desktops. Bad glue perhaps?

 

[defor]

Bad glue perhaps?

Tape actually.

Nothing some replacement 3M tape off Amazon can't fix though.

 

[John8520]

Well, I need to get new feet first. I think the ones I have aren't quite tall enough. Looks like about 1/4" would be appropriate.

These look pretty good: https://www.amazon.com/Rubber-Adhesive-Bumper-Square-Bumpers/dp/B01M8I6YLH/

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

That's a lot of feets. Check out that home grown NC company Lowe's or an orange box for a smaller quantity, more choices and immediate gratification. Don't think they come in black if that's a consideration though.

 

[John8520]

Well, I have a few other PCs and monitors that could use new feets, and as much as I like Lowes' selection, their prices aren't great. Same with HD.

The amazon price/foot is pretty good, and the no-rush shipping gets me credit toward other goodies, so I'm cool with that.

 

[Brett B.]

Nice score.  For some reason these are super sensitive to vibration - I have to go reseat everything, every time I move it or it won't boot.  I don't know if it's just simply age, or oxidation on connectors, or something else but both of mine are definitely more sensitive to vibration than they were years ago.

 

[John8520]

Yeah, I definitely remember having to reseat cards and RAM in the past. I know some Beiges have problems booting with a dead/low PRAM, so replacing that may have helped as well.

It also sat in storage for close to a decade according to the owner, so it's likely that it just took a while to get all the juice flowing. The HDD was definitely like that - first few attempts to boot made some awful noises, but after a while it's up and running perfectly find. Norton Disk Doctor doesn't find any issues on it either.