Woo! Power Macintosh G3 Tower and a PowerBook 520 too!

[Patrickool93]

BeigePower

Pretty good specs too. It's local pick up so I should get it soon too

UW 9GB Scsi HD

256mb RAM

10.2

USB Card

CD-RW

 

[jkoci]

Nice. Beige G3s are dirt cheap these days. I got my desktop G3 a while back for $10 on a local pickup.

 

[MacMan]

Cool find. A 333MHz machine too! The beige G3 towers are solid machines and will give many more years of service. The thing that I noticed when I got my 266MHz machine is the size of the thing, it was much wider than I expected.

 

[bluekatt]

not too shabby dont forget the 8 gig os x partition bug

and that some of them cant handle slave drives too well

 

[funkytoad]

Yay!

 

[Patrickool93]

Grey 68k Power! I looked at the guys other auction, saw this with 5 minutes left and couldn't say no

36 Mb of ram is great too! ) ) )

 

[The Macster]

Hey, you're getting all the same Macs as I've got! Anyway, 36 MB in the 520 is nice, you'll be able to run OS 8.1 on that - mine only has 8 MB and so has to live with 7.6.1. The memory upgrades for 5xxs are usually very hard to come by.

That G3 is a bit ugly with that extra CD drive with the non-CD bezel though, are you going to try and get a blank bezel for that (or a second proper CD bezel if you want two CD drives)? Don't forget that you'll need a PCI graphics card for it if you want to install 10.3 or 10.4 though (recommended, unless you're only going to put Classic on it, as 10.2 is rubbish). You shouldn't have the Rev A Rom with lack of slave drive support though, as the 333s were the last Beigeys.

 

[MultiFinder]

Wow! Nice score on the PowerBook! I wish that I could find a decently-priced memory upgrade for mine, so finding one maxed out like that is awesome!

 

[Patrickool93]

Macster: While I woud want the extra CD Bezel I'll probably never get one for free/cheap. I'm excited about the 520 because this is my first 68040 PowerBook. yeah, the RAM was a deal breaker, so I bit! I hope the batterys are good and maybe, just maybe it'll have a card cage

 

[MacMan]

The 520 is a nice find too, especially since has good RAM and disk specs and comes with a transceiver and a SCSI cable. My 520c is stuck with 8MB RAM for the time being and upgrades are elusive these days.

 

[Quadraman]

The only way I would have bid on that G3 was if it was local pickup with no other bidders. It's nice, but definitely not worth $50 after shipping is figured in. I also check the sellers of items I am bidding on to see if they have anything else I can use. When I got my second Powerbook 150, I checked out the sellers other lisitings and he also had a 1400CS closing in 30 seconds so I sniped it and got both for the same shipping price.

 

[Patrickool93]

Same, I wouldn't have got it if it hadn't been pick up. I should be picking them up sometime after 5 tomorrow.

 

[Temetka]

Congrats. BeigeG3's are great machines. I have a Rev B minitower that I upgraded to 500MHz and 640MB of RAM. It has a Rage Orion card in it with 32MB of VRAM and Panther runs great on it. I also stuck an ATA/100 card and a 40GB Maxtor HD in it. It's surprisingly quick for what I use it for.

For the price you paid and the specs you got, I think you got a great deal. Considering that you have a Rev C ROM you shouldn't have any problems with slave drives. You might also get lucky and have the newer VRM module that allows for G4 ZIF CPU's to be installed. I can only imagine how much more of a speed increase I would get if I stuck a 600MHz G4 in my machine.

I don't have the cash to buy the 1GHz G3 or 1GHz G4 upgrades that are available. That being said I wouldn't mind picking one up for around $125 or so. Then it would be very fast machine and I dare say that Tiger would run pretty good on it. I have a flashed Radeon 9000 with 256MB of RAM on it. I could install it and activate quartz extreme via the hack.

Anyway I could ramble on for a long time about the various upgrade paths available for the G3 minitowers.

Congratulations on getting an awesome machine and a laptop for $20 and local pickups at that. Very nice.

 

[The Macster]

You might also get lucky and have the newer VRM module that allows for G4 ZIF CPU's to be installed. I can only imagine how much more of a speed increase I would get if I stuck a 600MHz G4 in my machine.

Could you please expand on that? This was mentioned here once before but never explained properly and there's been a lot of conflicting info here about whether the Yikes! CPU can be dropped into any Beigey or if only the OWC/Sonnet G4s made specifically for the Beige will work, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of clear info about it anywhere else. I know that if you have a "ROYAL" VRM then you can't use any G4 CPU, either the Yikes or the specific Beige upgrade ones, but is there any way of using a Yikes! CPU? I only ask because the Yikes! CPU seems to be obtainable for next to nothing, whereas the other ones that look the same but apparently aren't are extremely expensive (more than a complete graphite G4 machine in fact!).

 

[Patrickool93]

I picked up both of these today! The G3 is yellowed, and the CD-RW bezel is not, so it looks funny. I have not tried out the G3. but the 520 is so cool! It has, of course, the 36mb of RAM, and tons of Graphic programs like Photoshop, and QuarkXPress. More tomorrow, I have to go to sleep XP

 

[Quadraman]

You might also get lucky and have the newer VRM module that allows for G4 ZIF CPU's to be installed. I can only imagine how much more of a speed increase I would get if I stuck a 600MHz G4 in my machine.

Could you please expand on that? This was mentioned here once before but never explained properly and there's been a lot of conflicting info here about whether the Yikes! CPU can be dropped into any Beigey or if only the OWC/Sonnet G4s made specifically for the Beige will work, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of clear info about it anywhere else. I know that if you have a "ROYAL" VRM then you can't use any G4 CPU, either the Yikes or the specific Beige upgrade ones, but is there any way of using a Yikes! CPU? I only ask because the Yikes! CPU seems to be obtainable for next to nothing, whereas the other ones that look the same but apparently aren't are extremely expensive (more than a complete graphite G4 machine in fact!).

I don't think you can use Yikes! CPU's in a beige. They were made to run on a 100mhz bus, which the beige doesn't have.

 

[Temetka]

I was referring to the CPU upgrades available from OWC, Sonnet, etc.

 

[Bunsen]

Hey Patrick. I mentioned in another thread that ebay seller macmetex has some 33MHz PB540 CPU modules going cheap. It's a drop in replacement.

 

[LSD]

I don't think you can use Yikes! CPU's in a beige. They were made to run on a 100mhz bus, which the beige doesn't have.

Assuming the VRM is sorted out, I can't see why it wouldn't work . The only problem you might have is cranking the multiplier up high enough to achieve the same CPU frequency on the slower bus.