Choosing a CPU upgrade for my Beige G3 266

[sunvalleylaw]

I have decided that I want my beige G3 desktop to be one of my flagship vintage machines. I just love the ugly old form factor, and the incorporation (first time for me) of color and CD-ROM. And that era was when I committed as a solo lawyer, to the Mac environment for my office, though I was using a '95 Performa, rather than a '98 PowerMac. I played around with Launch magazines, switched off Word to WordPerfect (and stayed there for years until Corel killed the Mac version later on) and played around with Myst on CD-Rom, though I never really solved the puzzle. (Going back to that now). And now, I want to incorporate early DAW and music production/recording with some vintage MIDI gear, and perhaps even use some of the musical work playing out, with a Powerbook 3400c I have (my next machine after my Performa). Will be looking for an accelerator or replacement motherboard for that 3400c also. I also will have a period correct Performa color CRT monitor to use as well.

Anyhow, I ran across a BUFFALO 500MHz G3 ZIF Upgrade 1MB Cache for Apple Power Macintosh, on the online auction site (please don't snipe me) and am considering it for my 266 MHz Beige G3. Anyone have any experience with this model or similar? It looks to be compatible. I will plan on also replacing/upgrading the fan and etc. I see there is also a POWERLEAP PL-G3/Z 500MHz G3 ZIF also available which might be a push and is around the same price but not sure about advantages/disadvantages. My Beige machine has an ATI Rage 128 from a B/W G3 already. It has 224 MB of RAM currently and a 6 GB IDE hard drive. I may end up putting in a BlueSCSI v.2 or just use an external one I have.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

 

[Phipli]

The 500MHz G3 will make a big performance difference. I haven't used that specific one, but I have a few faster G3 chips knocking around.

For your hard disk, I'd consider trying a StarTech IDE to SATA adapter and putting a 120GB SSD in there (don't bother going bigger, it just causes more issues). Make sure you keep your boot disks in the first 8GB though! There is an issue that makes it not like booting from past that. What I usually do is partition a disk something like...
1GB (8.1), 2GB (9.2.2) , 5GB 10.2(?) and then the rest of the disk for storage and applications.

Your graphics card is plenty good enough really - I actually find the Rage 128s run faster at 2D than the later cards like the 7000 or 9200.

A bit more RAM might be useful some late OS 9 games like to have a few hundred MB - you have to watch the height (G3s need low profile modules), and look for ones with lots of chips because they don't like "high density" chips, but they can be found! I got some 256MB PC133 modules that fit for only something like £5 a while back. They were Epson branded, perhaps out of a printer?

Remember to turn off the RAM test to save a bit of time during boot otherwise it will sit with a blank screen for about 45 seconds if you put 768MB in it.

Which perch card do you have? The AV ones can be fun for retro video and audio editing projects, but they can take a while to find at a good price.

 

[sunvalleylaw]

Which perch card do you have? The AV ones can be fun for retro video and audio editing projects, but they can take a while to find at a good price.

Thanks for that! Not sure. I am away from that machine for a few days so will have to look when I get back. Good thought!

 

[sunvalleylaw]

@Phipli Pretty sure it is just the stock Whisper.

 

[herd]

I suppose the ultimate CPU would be one of the ~1GHz G3 boards using a 750G chip, but I suppose you should go with whatever you can find these days. The ZIF adapter should let you try a few different CPU modules that are more common, including one of the G4 ZIF boards?

Good luck with your project and let us know how it goes!

 

[obsolete]

FWIW, there is a path to adding USB to your personality card thanks to @croissantking: https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/getting-g3-whisper-perch-usb-working.43681/

Saves a PCI slot for something else.

 

[joevt]

List of GPU upgrades for the Beige G3:
https://everymac.com/upgrade_cards/by_system/powermac_g3.html

The two most interesting seem to be these:
PowerForce G3 ZIF 1.1
Encore G4 1.0/1M