Upgrading a G3 B&W 450MHz
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.
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
Basically, if I upgrade my videocard from a Rage 128 to a Radeon 7000, will I see a big improvement?
Good luck, and welcome to the Mac world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?