Upgrading a G3 B&W 450MHz

iguanadoniguanadon
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
So I got a G3 B&W 450MHz, this is the first mac I owned, (I love it so far), I would just like to get a little faster performance out of it. I heard that by upgrading the graphics card and using the Quartz Express hack it speeds it up.



In anycase, my question is: On eBay there are some hacked PC video cards that have better specs (more ram, dual displays), is it worth it to spend the extra ~$20 and buy one of those insted of a card thats made for mac? Will it cause any conflicts? etc...



Thanks in advanced.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 9
    iguanadoniguanadon Posts: 9member
    Bump



    Basically, if I upgrade my videocard from a Rage 128 to a Radeon 7000, will I see a big improvement?
  • Reply 2 of 9
    idaveidave Posts: 1,283member
    I use a B&W at work, running OS X 10.3. It's supposed to be a backup (graphics) workstation but I find I spend half of each day on it lately. My perception is that it has a slow hard disk as well as a slow processor. (Booting and restarting seems to take forever.) I added some RAM which seemed to help somewhat. My opinion is that you might see more noticeable performance perks by getting a faster hard disk or more RAM, than with a GPU upgrade. Since this is a pretty old machine, I would not recommend spending as much as it would take to upgrade the central processor. (Not even sure you can do that with B&Ws.)



    Good luck, and welcome to the Mac world.
  • Reply 3 of 9
    guarthoguartho Posts: 1,208member
    ^ A good fast hard disk will make a big difference. We just put a 7200 rpm WD in Dad's B&W and it made for a significant increase in speed.



    Also, I made the same vid-card upgrade you're talking about. After I put the 7000 in my G3 had a little trouble with overheating and freezing up. Some creative ductwork with cardboard and electrical tape took care of that. As far as a performance difference, I could run Return to Castle Wolfenstein after the upgrade, but nothing else was noticeably differnt.
  • Reply 4 of 9
    fulmerfulmer Posts: 171member
    I've got the same machine running as my home server. I put a 120GB drive in it and a total of 640MB RAM. It runs 10.3 just fine. I did upgrade the video card to an ATI 9200 PCI with 128MB V-RAM.
  • Reply 5 of 9
    isomethingisomething Posts: 61member
    What knid of budget do you have? I recommend doing the works. Fatser Hard Drive, more RAM, better Video Card. You could also look into upgrading to a 500 MHz G3, but I don't think that 50 MHz more is really going to help to much or even be worth the money and hassle.
  • Reply 6 of 9
    idaveidave Posts: 1,283member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by isomething

    What knid of budget do you have? I recommend doing the works. Fatser Hard Drive, more RAM, better Video Card. You could also look into upgrading to a 500 MHz G3, but I don't think that 50 MHz more is really going to help to much or even be worth the money and hassle.



    IMHO, if you're going to do all that, you might as well buy a Mac mini which will be worlds faster and not much more money, especially if you were to consider a CPU upgrade, which wouldn't be cheap.
  • Reply 7 of 9
    iguanadoniguanadon Posts: 9member
    Quote:

    What knid of budget do you have? I recommend doing the works. Fatser Hard Drive, more RAM, better Video Card. You could also look into upgrading to a 500 MHz G3, but I don't think that 50 MHz more is really going to help to much or even be worth the money and hassle.



    Im looking to spend no more than $100 on this machine.



    I already have a 80gig 5400rpm drive in it, but it is very noisey so I'm going to see if I find a good deal on a new drive in the sunday paper's ads. Either way I don't think I would see a big performance increase becuase the machine is ATA33 and XBench says I'm getting around 28mb/s drive speeds.



    I also upgraded the ram to 512mb (4x128mb), which I'm guessing is good enough.



    Altough I heard that if I put in a better graphics card than the rage I can turn on Quartz Extreme for it, which would increase performance.

    I'm diciding weather or not to get a flashed 64mb ram model, or to stick with the one that is made for macs with 32mb ram and ~$20 less.



    I've also overclocked PCs before via jumpers and bios functions, but I don't know if the fanless heatsink would like the ~50mhz increase.



    Basically I'm just trying this machine out to see if I like macs. I'm just doing webstuff and using iChat, but right now its a little bit too slow for my likeing. As I type this there is a ~1/2 second delay from when I press the key to when the characters show up.
  • Reply 8 of 9
    idaveidave Posts: 1,283member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Iguanadon

    Basically I'm just trying this machine out to see if I like macs. I'm just doing webstuff and using iChat, but right now its a little bit too slow for my likeing. As I type this there is a ~1/2 second delay from when I press the key to when the characters show up.



    Sounds like you're taking the right approach. There is definitely something wrong though if you're seeing keystroke delays. That's not normal at all, not even for a G3 running OS X. I've run OS X on slower machines than yours and not had that problem.
  • Reply 9 of 9
    iguanadoniguanadon Posts: 9member
    Quote:

    There is definitely something wrong though if you're seeing keystroke delays. That's not normal at all, not even for a G3 running OS X. I've run OS X on slower machines than yours and not had that problem.



    I only have this problem in Safari when I enter text in the post box, I don't get any delay in other applications.



    So what do you guys think, is it worth it to spend the extra ~$20 and get a hacked 64mb radeon 7000, or to just get the made for mac 32mb radeon 7000?
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