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g3 vs g4 smurftower (B&W) upgrades

Submitted by Contradude on March 22, 2008 - 5:31am. PowerPC Macs

I plan to use my B&W g3 tower with a flashed nvidia 6200 pci and would like to do some light gaming. which would everyone recommend, the 1.2ghz g3 without altivec or the 1.0 g4 which pulls down the system bus to 66mhz?

Thanks for the info,

Contradude

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eeun's picture

IIRC, you won't gain anything

Submitted by eeun on March 22, 2008 - 5:20pm.

IIRC, you won't gain anything for gaming from Altivec, unless the game was specifically programmed to make Altivec calls.
The extra 200 MHz on CPU and 34 MHz on bus would make the G3 my vote.

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thanks for the quick response

Submitted by Contradude on March 23, 2008 - 1:41am.

thanks for the quick response! I'll go with the g3 upgrade.
Does anyone know where to get cheap 256meg modules that will work with my smurf tower? how picky is the B&W about the ram it takes? If I remember correctly, a B&W will only take low density modules (chips on both sides) right?

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Jon's picture

I've picked up several sticks

Submitted by Jon on March 23, 2008 - 6:56am.

I've picked up several sticks of two sided PC100 256MB RAM at a local used shop, and I don't recall any of them not working in my B&W.

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iamdigitalman's picture

1.2ghz?

Submitted by iamdigitalman on March 23, 2008 - 9:29am.

Where is this 1.2ghz G3 module? The fastest I have seen is the 1.1ghz powerlogix G3, which was discontiuned for a while, but is back now. I run a 400 overclocked to 450 in my tower, but I want something faster. I have been contimplating the 1ghz G4, but that underclocks the bus, which would only be worth it to install leopard.

BTW, I don't think it's to picky on RAM. When I got mine, it had a single sided 256mb module, but was only reading half. I ran it for the longest time on 512mb, but I got 4 256mb sticks a few months back, all double sided, but each stick is different. I dunno if any of them are 2-2-2, but it runs descent enough. And all 1gb shows up for work.

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Hokusai's picture

Hmm...

Submitted by Hokusai on March 23, 2008 - 9:06pm.

I suppose it really depends. The B&W G3 is an old machine nowadays. So, upgrade at your own risk. Personaly, the 1GHz G3 is a relatively cheap upgrade these days.

About that Geforce 6200 card, G3s can't use it. Well, it will work but anything using OpenGL will crash, as far as I know. Apple somehow tied in the Nvidia OpenGL drivers to Altivec, I think. So, a G4 may be the only option for you.

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yeah, that's what everyone ov

Submitted by Contradude on March 24, 2008 - 9:35pm.

yeah, that's what everyone over on macelite said. looks like I'm going to try and snag a g4 upgrade to go with that. thanks.

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