Power Mac G3

[Irinikus]

Today I started messing around with this machine. There were mismatched DIMMS, so I pulled the odd ones and the system now only has 256MB of RAM, but this should be sufficient for such a system! (I way prefer to have matched DIMMS!)

I've also started to take a look at installing some games, and have installed Dark Forces so far. Here's what the desktop currently looks like:

Here's he current system configuration:

As with all machines, there are quite a few future upgrade options for this machine, including the likes of the 500MHz G3 CPU
!

 

[CRaven]

All your machines look brand new

 

[Irinikus]

All your machines look brand new

I've worked hard to get them like that!

 

[Irinikus]

I just purchased this card for this system: (The 128MB Apple version of the Radion 9200, the fastest card that will go into a G3)

It comes with a driver CD, which supports Mac Classic OS 9.2!!!

Here are the card's details:

Next I'll get one of these SCSI adapters for the machine, as the one it's currently fitted with is crap and with this I could improve the drive performance by up to 8X!!! As The drive that it's fitted with is capable of doing 80MB/s and it's currently only doing 10MB/s!!!

The system's fitted with a Quantum Viking II:

 

[Irinikus]

I just purchased this SCSI U320 card for this machine:

Unfortunately it won't run under Mac OS 9.2 as the driver doesn't support it, so I'm going to have to upgrade to Mac OS 10.4.11 Tiger, as Tiger is the latest version of Mac OS which will run on the G3!

I don't want to destroy the Mac OS 9,2 install, so I plan to install a Pair of these Hitachi 15KRPM U320 SCSI drives. (The same type that are going into my Dual Pentium Pro build)

I intend using a pair of these SCSI cables to wire the drives up and keep everything neat:

I will attempt to go with software RAID 0, but if that fails I'll simply install the OS on one of the drives and use the other to store ISO's

EIther way, this system's going to receive a significant performance upgrade as far as the system drive goes!

 

[Jacques]

I have tried so many ROM patched PC versions of the ATI 9200 AGP card in my Quicksilver I've lost count. Most of the cards ship with high density gfx ram and will only report half the actual amount. Only one 'sort of' worked and would only yield one resolution in 10.4 and failed to give anything above 640x480 framebuffer only resolution in 9.2.2. No drivers would work and in the end I gave up and am just running the standard MX 2 card. I'd love to just get an ATI 8500 card but they are very rare and very expensive!

 

[ghost180sx]

Beauty! Love these old Macs. With a decent SCSI card, you should be sailing, plus be able to connect all kinds of SCSI external goodies.

 

[Irinikus]

This Machine is fitted with the 450MHZ G3 CPU, the fastest that was officially released for this machine:

The G3 400MHz module looked like this:

Notice the difference in the cache chips.

There was an aftermarket chip released running @ 1GHz (PowerLogix PCIGX10001 PowerForce 750GX G3/1GHz (1000MHz)) Which featured on-die cache

It was based on this chip:

PowerPC 750GX
750GX (codenamed Gobi), revealed in 2004, was a 7xx processor from IBM. It has an on-die 1 MB L2 cache, a top frequency of 1.1 GHz, and support for bus speeds up to 200 MHz among other enhancements compared to 750FX. It is manufactured using a 0.13 μm process with copper interconnects, low-K dielectric, and silicon on insulator technology. The 750GX has 44 million transistors, a die size of 52 mm2 and consumes less than 9 W at 1 GHz at typical loads.

I just installed 1GB of RAM into the machine and take note of the fact that there is now no virtual memory usage: (It was initially using 435MB, which was considerable!)

This is how it looked with 256MB of memory installed for comparative purposes:

So this little upgrade within itself should improve system performance!

The system memory upgrade has marginally improved the system drive performance: (This is still the standard SCSI setup that the machine came with)

This was the original drive performance with 256MB of Ram installed: