Best upgrade for an old G3 Beige?

mac hammer fan · July 27, 2005 5:30AM

A friend of mine has an old G3 Beige Revision 1 with a G4 ZIF@450 Mhz.

Unfortunatley the video RAM DIMM slot is broken so that there is only 2 MB VRAM installed.

There are already two PCI-cards (firewire & USB) installed. So there is only one slot left.

What would be the best buy: an ATI Radeon 9200 or a Sonnet Tempo ATA PCI 133 card?

He is running Panther 10.3.9 with XPOstfacto. He doesn't play games, uses the Mac for internet and wordprocessing in AppleWorks and database in Filemaker Pro,

TIA

robin hood · July 27, 2005 5:54AM

Has he considered getting a Mac mini, eMac or even an iBook instead? It might be a better idea in the long run.

mac hammer fan · July 27, 2005 6:02AM

He only wants to spend 100 dollars and wants to be able to boot under OS9 too.

robin hood · July 27, 2005 8:08AM

I suppose in that case an ATI Radeon 9200.

xool · July 27, 2005 10:35AM

I agree, the new GPU is the way to go.

However, you can always get a single PCI card with both FireWire and USB on it, and then install a third IDE or SCSI card.

However, the bus speed is a paltry 66 MHz, and even if you overclock it you're not getting it much faster. It may have some decent upgrades, but the machine is still gonna feel sluggish. Its from 1997 after all, before even the first iMacs were introduced.

How much RAM does it have? 512 MB is the minimum.

rrabu · July 27, 2005 11:12AM

The biggest difference for speed on my old Beige 266 was replacing the hard drive with a 7200 rpm drive. It made my boot times in OS9 drop by more than half. Of course, rebooting is mostly what Mac users did in those days....

The RAM tip is a good one as well as the video card. I'd go RAM first if he has less than 512M. Those old towers actually support 3 256M DIMMS unlike the manual's stated 3 128M DIMMS max.

serrano · July 27, 2005 6:08PM

If Ram is fine I'd say get a faster harddrive, it did wonders for my iBook.

beigeuser · July 30, 2005 10:12AM

As a previous beige owner, here are my suggestions:

1. ATA 133 controller would not have any increase in speed unless you have replaced your stock hard drive with a faster one. Since you only have a budget of approximately $100, a faster and larger hard drive with stock controller is better than a stock hard drive with fast controller. Besides, aftermarket ATA controller cards seem to have a short pause at startup. Possibly because it needs to load the BIOS before it can access the hard drives connected to it.

2. Judging by the way you use the computer, a graphics card upgrade will not increase any performance. PCI cards are not supported by Quartz Extreme so all the drawing will be done by the CPU regardless of what graphics card you install. There is a hack that will allow Quartz Extreme to work. I think it was called PCI extreme. But due to the limited bandwidth of the PCI bus, the performance will actually decrease when you put heavy loads on the card. But the hack does work well most of the time so it may be worth it. Oh wait, you are using OS 9. You should see accelerated graphics. Maybe worth it.

3. You should upgrade RAM if you haven't maxed it out already. But be careful. The beige does not accept RAM sticks bigger than 256MB. So even if you install 512MB sticks, only 256MB will be recognized. The theoretical max is 768MB. PC66 (You can substitute it with PC133) is becoming hard to find nowadays. If you are planning to keep the machine for a while, get the RAM now while it is still available.

The final specs of my beige was G3/500, 768MB RAM, 2x80GB Hard drive RAID (The striped one) connected via ATA 100, RADEON, USB & firewire ports via PCI.

Even with all those mods, it didn't not run the latest OS and it was half the speed of the cheapest Mac available at the time so I decided to get a new machine. Maybe you should consider to do the same?

ebby · July 30, 2005 4:51PM

I suppose the ATI Radeon 9200/Beige G3/Mac OSX bug was worked out. I have not heard of a solution, but haven't been looking for one either.

I'm also skeptical on that RAM limitation. 256MB sticks seems small and I could swear I have a 512MB and a 256MB in my Beige. (Too bad it is not hooked up right now.)

mac hammer fan · July 30, 2005 5:03PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Ebby

I suppose the ATI Radeon 9200/Beige G3/Mac OSX bug was worked out. I have not heard of a solution, but haven't been looking for one either.

I'm also skeptical on that RAM limitation. 256MB sticks seems small and I could swear I have a 512MB and a 256MB in my Beige. (Too bad it is not hooked up right now.)

The Beige G3 can't use 512 MB RAM modules, I am 100% sure of that.

However, despite the fact I use 3 x 256 MB RAM in a G3 Beige revision 2, I couldn't use these (OWC) RAM modules in a G3 Beige revision 1...

slughead · July 30, 2005 10:26PM

I had a beige G3 once.. I found this to be the best upgrade

in all seriousness, ATI Radeon 7000, max out the RAM, and put on OS X 10.4

formerlurker · July 30, 2005 11:13PM

Ah, so he wants to flush $100 down the toilet, because spending $499 on a Mini is too much money.

Won't THAT seem like a smart investment if the logic board on the G3 dies a month later!!

Save the $100 until the poor old girl dies completely, and then put it towards a replacement.

ebby · July 31, 2005 12:08AM

Woops, Got the 9200 and 7000 mixed up. The 7000 had that funky problem. I don't think there is a PCI version of a 9200 that would work in a Beige.

EDIT: Never mind. They all have problems.

mac hammer fan · July 31, 2005 5:44AM

Thanks for all your advice.

The only thing he will do is replace the bad ROM revision 1 module and add a really cheap ATI 128 PCI card. He will save his money for a second hand OS9 bootable AGP G4 Mac next year.

(the old G3 machine was already upgraded with a G4 ZIF, had 384 MB RAM and a 40GB hard drive and is now still useful for internet, database and wordprocessing.

seb · August 2, 2005 1:10AM

fer chrissake go on ebay and get a machine made in the past 4 years for a few hundred bucks...

Best upgrade for an old G3 Beige?

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