2 beige G3 towers
- Thread starter Quadraman
- Start date
Yes, if you have a spare blank front bezel or don't mind having the Zip hole in front of a hard drive - luckily mine came without a Zip drive (I think they were optional when new) so I had the right bezels for hard drives. The 8600/9600 tower has space for even more drives, as well as 6 PCI cards though - I don't know why they made it smaller, as I think bigger is always better when it comes to tower cases! 
I thought the 8600 tower was shorter. Only the 9600 has 6 PCI slots.Yes, if you have a spare blank front bezel or don't mind having the Zip hole in front of a hard drive - luckily mine came without a Zip drive (I think they were optional when new) so I had the right bezels for hard drives. The 8600/9600 tower has space for even more drives, as well as 6 PCI cards though - I don't know why they made it smaller, as I think bigger is always better when it comes to tower cases!
Ah, I don't know - I was thinking of the larger tower that had 6 PCI slots and 2 additional drive bays at the bottom, but I've never seen any of these machines for real so can't be sure whether they both had that case or if that was only the 9600. That case is brilliant though, as of course the only way that you can improve on the perfection that is the beige G3 tower's case is to make it bigger 
Shortening the 8600/9600 case to make the beige g3 MT eliminated the 2 bottom HD bays, the rest is exactly the same as the 8600/9600 (HD bay over the PS, floppy, zip or HD, HD bay).
The cool thing about that case is that if you have the correct bezels you could have all cdroms or HDs instead of the floppy and zip, which you cannot do on the older PCI machines.
I suspect that Apple figured that since they went to IDE onboard for the Beige G3 you could only install 4 drives anyway (2 HD, cdrom, and zip) so why bother with the bottom 2 drive bays. If you add a SCSI card you might as well use an external drive case.
The cool thing about that case is that if you have the correct bezels you could have all cdroms or HDs instead of the floppy and zip, which you cannot do on the older PCI machines.
I suspect that Apple figured that since they went to IDE onboard for the Beige G3 you could only install 4 drives anyway (2 HD, cdrom, and zip) so why bother with the bottom 2 drive bays. If you add a SCSI card you might as well use an external drive case.
I've noticed not many computer makers offer you lots of expansion slots unless you are buying a high end server anymore. I remember I used to base my motherboard buying decisions in part on how many expansion slots it came with. Boards used to regularly come with 5 or 6 slots even back in the days of 8 and 16 bit slots. Now you're lucky to get 2.
Built in sound, network, raid, usb, firewire and in some case video make most slots obsolete. Only gamers tend to want a huge video card (that overhangs a few slots anyway) along with a creative soundcard of some type.
Even back in the day there were cheap integrated motherboards with maybe 2 PCI slots you could use.
Even back in the day there were cheap integrated motherboards with maybe 2 PCI slots you could use.
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