Hello to all, just joined this forum today, though I have been a G3 user with the Wallstreet (which I've ran 8.6 to Panther on) and the All-In-One (which I love how adaptable that is!)
Need some advice:
I’m looking into buying for real cheap… ( like $50)
Power Mac G3/333
Code Name: Gossamer
A Low End Mac Best Buy
A Road Apple (Rev. 1 only)
I have heard a lot of good about the Beige G3 Macs, and the most important thing here is the upgrade-ability. Basic questions are
1) Does it support IDE
2) How common are the G4 upgrade cards and where are the best places to look for them?
Thanks!
Greg Goodwin
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I trust that you're buying the one with the blue and white case? If so, congrats! You did pick up a pretty good deal. Yes, it does support IDE, and the G4 upgrade cards are fairly common. The best place to find them is ebay or the Low End Mac swap list.
Then you know the Beige G3. It's the same motherboard, capabilities, etc. They're good machines for Classic MacOS, but they have this bad habit of being picky and tempermental under OS X. In particular the built-in IDE sort of sucks.
(It's slow, is prone to random device compatibility problems, and under OS X has the under-8-gigabyte boot partition limitation shared with the tray-loading iMacs.)
For $50 if you're lucky you *might* find a stripped Blue-And-White, which has better IDE and firmware better suited to running OS X. ("Official" support for the Beige was discontinued with 10.2, while a Blue and White is the oldest machine able to run 10.4.) You can upgrade either machine with the same "ZIF" processors, but a decent upgrade CPU will cost you a good fraction of the cost of a *much* faster overall machine (Mac Mini), so think things through before you go spending money on that.
--Peace
I'll agree on the IDE controller suckage. I had a 10GB UDMA33 drive on the main IDE bus when I first installed OS X on my 266DT. It ran ok. Then, I swapped in a quieter 18GB SCSI 50-pin on the internal SCSI. I'm not sure if it was Fast SCSI, but I think it was. It runs much more smoothly and quikly. Bad 16MB/s IDE vs. decent 10MB/s Fast SCSI means the SCSI outperforms the IDE on the Beige G3s.
I just brought home an ATA133 controller I found used for $10 today. maybe I'll get the urge to see how it compares to the SCSI if I can get it flashed to OF...