Routes to upgrade a B/W Powermac

I'm not sure if it would or not.

You may consider a SATA PCI card to upgrade to speedier hard drives (I think I the Mac supports those). Better GPU and max ram would also be things to consider.

Yep, a sil 3112 based sata card will work in these guys, but i did get some oddities (sometimes it will kp on boot and the controller is quite picky about hdd's) this might be because I am using a modified PC card, or it might be down to the G3

A wile ago i did a similar thing to my G3 b/w, 500mhz sonnet G4 CPU, sil 3112 based sata controller, as much ram as I could find and a 60GB sata hdd

Hi haemoglobin,

Be warned about G4 processor-upgrades faster than 733MHz (I think it is). They cause the bus speed to reduce down to 66MHz. From what I have read, the sweet spot is about G4 700MHz.

As for speeding up your B&W G3, I would look for an ordinary G4 500MHz and set the jumpers accordingly. You will need a G4 heatsink. Actually, you've already done this.

Get 1GB RAM. Get a SATA-I card (mine is a SeriTek but the Acard 6880M work fine too - the former is 64-bit while the latter is 32-bit). A U160 SCSI card (Adaptec 19160, 29160 ATTO UL3D) together with an 80-pin U320 SCSI drive and adapter is also a good option. SATA gives you the option of SSDs and the quietness they bring.

Get yourself an ATi Radeon 9000 PCI card. The ATi Radeon 7000 and all of the 32MB nvidia GeForce2 are also OK. These cards have DVI ports and give crisper displays. They are also LCD friendly.

If speed and data throughput are important, then understand how your 4 PCI ports work. The small one is a 66MHz, 32-bit bus while the longer ones are 33MHz, 64-bit buses. As far as I know, the bus runs at the speed of the slowest card, so a 33MHz, 32-bit card will cause all cards to run at a maximum of 33MHz on a 32-bit bus.

all the best,

aa

Hey

Thank you for the info, I will be taking the B/W out of the attic tomorrow and giving it a brush down. Fingers crossed it will work all fine and dandy.

Question how easy would it be to source a CPU greater then 500mhz? I have a G4 550mhz for my pismo and after a look online. I concluded I'm pretty lucky to have it. Wasn't sure how easy they are to source.

ArmorAlley said:

If speed and data throughput are important, then understand how your 4 PCI ports work. The small one is a 66MHz, 32-bit bus while the longer ones are 33MHz, 64-bit buses. As far as I know, the bus runs at the speed of the slowest card, so a 33MHz, 32-bit card will cause all cards to run at a maximum of 33MHz on a 32-bit bus.

Click to expand...

I thought only a handful of 66Mhz compliant PCI cards were ever made - notably Apple's Rage 128.  But it didn't give much of a performance boost.  Keep this card in the 66Mhz slot and all other slots run at 33Mhz.

I'm pretty sure it is a ATI Rage that i have in the G3, but for some reason I keep thinking I did something with a Voodoo card..I'll know more when I bring it down out the loft.

Atm I'd just like to give it a speed increase, atm a G4 500mhz will actually be about the same speed as my Pismo, actually a little bit slowly as the PB is running a G4 550mhz. The G3 1ghz route sounds good, though I bet those chips are hard as hell to find these days.

It depends on what you're doing. If you've got any AltiVec enhanced tasks the G4 will trash a faster G3. If you just need raw clock speed then the G3 might be better.

But are high speed G3's easy to come by?

That's hard to say. Scour the country specific eBay sites (do *not* log in; search for within that country only) every day, When I was looking, I checked out the sites for the U.S., Canada, France, the U.K., Germany, Italy and Australia. Many sellers mark the sale as being within the country in question but, when asked, will ship overseas. What is a bigger problem in the U.K. and the States is eBay's Global Shipping Program. Here you will not get the option of the cheapest postage and you will have to pay customs (as against taking your chances with customs). eBay's Global Shipping Program is expensive and very buyer-unfriendly.

My Sonnet Crescendo 1000MHz G4 cost me almost $100 and that was before shipping and customs and then it slowed by bus-speed down by a third.

Go to the xlr8yourmac website. You'll find speed comparisons between the various G3 and G4 processors on the B&W G3 and on G4s. There isn't that much of a difference. You have a 500Mhz G4. I'd stick with that.

Thanks for the advice, the more that I have looked in to it. The more I've concluded I've got the best setup I can have, in terms of CPU.

Really if I'm after something that will be as quick as my 1.33ghz iBook, I should probably be looking towards a dual core G4 500 or single core 1ghz. If anyone is sat reading this and thinking, why not get a G5. The reason is because of its size, the G5 case as I recall it, is pretty damn big and will look out of place sitting on my desk. Where as the old B/W form factor is a little more manageable and really easy to work on!

How about the last MDD?

I had considered the MDD

I was never one for spending crazy money on single upgrades so one of my B&W G3's has a G3-400 or 500 and the other has a G4-450 from what I recall. Max RAM and Radeon 7000's plus misc cards work well. ZIF processors are hard to find these days and tend to be expensive once you get out of the stock models. You can get a fast G4 machine for what you would pay for a G3 upgrade for a B&W (at least for the moment).

Thanks for your posts, which I've read just in time.

I still have my old PowerMac G3 b/w 350 in the cellar, which was replaced by the first G4 Mini, ten years ago.

So it's my beloved Mac, which I upgraded a little many years ago (SCSI card, USB 2.0 card, Stealth serial port instead of a modem - so I could use my US Robotics v.everything - the best and most expensive user modem at this time).

A half year ago I persuaded someone to sell me his Sonnet Encore/ZIF G4 800MHz (the 66MHz bus thing...) and now I have little time to blow the dust of my G3.

I've got 4x 256MB Ram, a new and silent harddisk and ordered a ATI Radeon 7000.

So I'm ready to read, what you'll write in this thread, what will be as usefull as the posts before.

MikeatOSX said:

I've got 4x 256MB Ram, a new and silent harddisk and ordered a ATI Radeon 7000.

Click to expand...

Just an offhand note: don't expect too much from a Radeon 7000. I have one in my old B&W and I think for OpenGL-ish things it ran... I dunno, maybe 30-ish% faster than the Rage 128?, with no significant difference I could see in desktop UI performance. Having it will let you play with enabling Quartz Extreme, but the general consensus is that doing so hurts more than it helps.

(The 7000, aka "Radeon VE/RV100" is a really stripped down card compared to the "real" R100 Radion or the improved RV200/Radeon 7500.)

Having the 7000 in the 66mhz slot and the Rage in one of the 33mhz slots did work fine for providing extra monitor support.

I'll use the Radeon 7000 for OS 9.2.2 most times. How will it work with it?

Well... I never actually got it to completely cooperate with my installation of 9, but I didn't try particularly hard. (I pretty exclusively used "Classic" to run older software.) Maybe in part my issues might have been due to the fact that my 7000 was a stripped down OEM model sold for use in Xserves, not the retail Mac Edition 7000?

(It was a long time ago, I just vaguely recall the particular ATI driver installer I tried not liking what it saw so I shrugged and moved on.)

Ok, I'll try this soon, when the video card is here.

Just returning to this thread, if I'm reading this correctly, the Rage 128 sounds like the best card to have inside your G3 Powermac, would that be right?

Hmm, the Rage 128 GL is the standard card, VGA only.

So far as I'm aware the "Best" cards you can use with OS 9 are the Radeon 8x00/9x00 series and some models of Nvidia GeForce up to... the 4TI, although I'm not certain the PCI versions of the latter are compatible with the drivers. (Seriously, have no idea.) I think the last "official" OS9-compatible PCI Radeon Mac edition card was a 9200-based card; notably it's actually not that much faster than the "original" R100 Radeon.

If you're using OS X arguably the best "bang-for-buck" card is probably a flashed GeForce FX 5200. (The cards used to be dirt cheap even when new.) Supposedly they'll even support Core Image under Tiger; that may not necessarily be a good thing given the bus bandwidth, but it's good for shock value. Said cards are essentially worthless under OS 9, however.

I was thinking today, I have a funny feeling I have a voodoo card in my G3. Will have to check when I get home

Well it looks like what I though was in my Powermac and what is, are two totally different subjects lol

I have

G4 500mhz CPU

512mb Ram

ATI Rage 16mb

Ultra66 Adaptor

PCI USB card

Ralink Wifi Card

Think my first step will be to upgrade the ram, upgrade to 10.4.11 and look for a better video card.

Rage 128 actually does surprisingly well with Tiger, just FYI.

Thanks for the info, I'll keep that in mind. Today I've been swapping out ram modules trying to find a setup which does not lead to the machine crashing. I have 2 pairs of 256mb PC133, both from different manufacturers. The Powermac was having none of it, so I took the memory out and tried other configurations.

I've ended up with 2x256mb Crucial brand, 2x128mb inferion modules. So far it seems to be working, I'm typing on the machine as we speak. I really need to update to 10.4.11, so I can use TenFourFox. Currently using an old version of Firefox, which is struggling with the site. Having 768mb instead of 512mb has made a visible difference to performance.

My G3 was topped out at a factory 450MHz with a rev 2 board and slightly faster Rev.2 Rage128 and 1Gb of RAM, with 7200rpm Seagate drives. My Yikes (which is essentially a B+W minus ADB and with firmware support for a G4 CPU) has basically the same setup but had a Sonnet 500MHz G4 ZIF upgrade in it and whilst a little faster it isnt hugely so... well at least wasnt until I stuck a n R7000 64Mb video card in it which did seem to slicken it up a fair bit. For what it's worth theyre still usable... in Panther they are slick and nice, in Tiger they lug a bit, especially the G3. Tiger really does benefit a lot from a better graphics card and Altivec it seems.

But yes, I have found this architecture to be very temperamental and particularly picky about RAM... basically its been a case of suck it and see. Cheap nasty PC-133 RAM that will work fine in my P133, and even my iMac's crashes my Yikes and B+W.

My B&W still only has the 640MB it came with when I ended up with it because none of the PC100/133 256MB DIMMs I had lying around, including some pretty expensive ones that worked *absolutely fine* in various Pentium II/III machines, would work reliably, causing heaps of kernel panics/freezes/other such nonsense.

These machines are also hideously picky about PCI cards in my experience. Mine hated three out of four USB cards I tried.

I know that all the PCI cards in this machine are alright, it's just the memory. Mixing modules is always going to be hazard prone, which is why I've bought four matching 256mb modules. Hopefully this will work, they are PC100, so i'm hoping that will help.

I just want to get this machine running stable again, it used to be such a lovely little mac

So I have spent a good part of today, swapping the ram in and out of this machine. Then this evening after the final straw or was it the last kernal panic. I took all the memory out, put it to one side and picked up random chips from the pile i had on the floor. Two odd 256 modules, two odd 128mb and what do you know, it works! it's not crashed, kernal panic'd. Sod law!