G3/350 (Slot Loading - Blueberry) Logic Board upgrade

[CursedSilicon]

Hi all,

I was donated an iMac G3, according to EveryMac it's a "G3/350 (Slot Loading - Blueberry)" specifically.

The hard drive is shot so I'll need to crack it open to work on it. While I'm in there I was curious about the viability of completely replacing its main logic board.

I can see that later iMacs went all the way up to 700Mhz G3's, with faster GPU's to boot.

Has anyone done this kind of retrofit of a newer board into an older unit before? If so are there any "gotchas" to be aware of?

 

[chelseayr]

other than for that the i/o panel had a few different variations (particularly with or without firewire port, especially that specific one cpu+firewire upgrade from sonnettech) and that you might have to recheck if the exact same flybacks/etc was extant between tray-days first and snowy last imac models (as otherwise trying to plug one power circuit into another logic board would..umm..well..you know)

thats all I can really think of saying now as I only have a bit of basic familiarity with imacs in the first place (I still could like a specific ilamp but maybe thats a bit too much of a wish for the time being tho heh)

 

[CursedSilicon]

I might de-solder the firewire port if it's easier to make it fit the existing I/O plate on the side (anything I could use Firewire for I'd probably sooner use my G4 MDD)

This one is a slot loader rather than the older tray models. I'm not sure if the CRT changed much in that intervening time or not?

 

[Byrd]

I recall the 500-600-700 boards were interchangeable but they won’t fit an earlier 350-400 model

 

[CursedSilicon]

Is it due to the side panel I/O or is the layout/mounting of the board itself physically different?