Nice pick up!

a single serial port (wtf? the other one has a blank), a built in modem

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Just answered your own question

I'm willing to bet the serial port with the blank is the one with the modem icon next to it.

I've never heard of a beige with a single serial port. There are two built in to the motherboard. The modem lives on the PERCH card, so that's not it.

What the hell, punch out the blank and see what's behind it.

No no no, what I meant was, if you have the modem in the slot on the personality card, why would you ever need a modem serial port?

That's why apple put blanks over the modem ports on macs that came with a modem.

My performa 6200 had one, and I've seen pictures of Beiges with them.

so there is a second serial port behind that? I will open her up tomorrow and look.

oh, forgot to mention it's the minitower, not the desktop

yeah, the modem looked to be on a card when I was in it.

also, did the 9600 not offer built in video? I seem to remember either the 8600, 9600, or BG3MT had a blank over where the video port would be.

-digital

Yes, there is most likely a port behind it. I suppose apple didn't want people to connect their old external modems and have it conflict with the internal modem, that's what the problem with the Performa 6200 was.

Also, I don't think the 9600 has internal video. I know for a fact that my 9500 does not, and my Beige G3MT has internal video, as do all others.

Nope, 9600s don't have internal video. I think the 8600 does, and can confirm that the G3MT definately does.

Yes, the 8600 has internal video. None of the 6 slot PCI Macs (9500, 9600) have built in video or any A/V functions so those ports are blocked off.

Alright, had the chance to boot it. Looks to be a video editor machine. Has a 100mb image of commercials, dunno if they were made by them or not, but the HD is labled "E. D. Jacobs Graphic Design".

It has a 233mhz G3, 160mb of RAm, a 128mb and a 32mb stick. Has Mac OS 9.0.4 and a bunch of Adobe apps, old version of stuffit. Looks like a CD burner and a scanner were hooked to it at one time. A 4gb HD in this one, little more than 900mb free.

But the biggest surprise is it has a working copy of Mac OS X Public Beta on it. The OS 9 System Folder is actually in /Mac OS 9/System Folder. Pretty cool. Unfortunantly, I could not log in to OS X because you have to type the name, the way it's set up. OS 9 has a spare account, so I can log in.

Any thoughts as to what to do with it now we know the specs? I am leaning more towards parent's computer.

Oh, I am using my B&W LCD (VGA) hooked to the ATI video card in the bottom PCI slot. When booting, I get some bad rasters, but they go away after the extensions start to march and the ATI drivers load. With OS X, I did not get any video until the progress bar. Shame, i wanted to see smiling mac with the circle thingy. Oh well.

-digital

Any thoughts as to what to do with it now we know the specs? I am leaning more towards parent's computer.

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Get a little bit more Ram and put Tiger on it - with Tiger they're very modern and useable machines. You might also want a better CPU as you can drop in the faster G3 CPUs from later Beiges or the B&W for a very cheap performance boost.

if you have the modem in the slot on the personality card, why would you ever need a modem serial port? /
My performa 6200 had one

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Because you might have more than one serial device that isn't a modem?

Any thoughts as to what to do with it now we know the specs? I am leaning more towards parent's computer.

Click to expand...

Get a little bit more Ram and put Tiger on it - with Tiger they're very modern and useable machines. You might also want a better CPU as you can drop in the faster G3 CPUs from later Beiges or the B&W for a very cheap performance boost.

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I have found the Beige G3s to be quite overclockable too. I have a 233 MHz machine running comfortably at 300 MHz. It's running Panther, with a Radeon 7000 card.

A 233Mhz G3 seems to be very slow for OSX to me. I would run OS 9.2.2 on it and dig out some old OS 9 Apps for it, the thing would fly. A little more RAM would probably be nice, also get a larger HD.

The beige is easy to overclock. All you need is a jumper block from a faster machine and hope the CPU can handle it.

It's easier just to dig the jumpers out of the block with a pin, I found they came out quite easily. I was changing it to make it accept the B&W's CPU though, personally I wouldn't risk overclocking my CPU or bus, but then I'm not a risk-taker

The modem slot on a beige G3 isn't really a CSII slot, it's just CSII form factor. It is really a serial port. When you put the modem in the modem slot, the modem port stops working. Thus the blank.

You can have either a modem internally or a working serial port, but not both.

Peace,

Drew

If anybody is interested, I know some interesting tidbits of information concerning clock speed modifications on beige G3s (specifically, ID'ing components to determine whether or not higher bus speeds are possible). It won't work on every beige G3 (usually just the first two revisions), but when it does, it works perfectly. Any interest and I'll put it in the G3 section.

What do you mean? If you identify the spec on the MPC106 ("Grackle") chip, you can usually figure out what a good possibility is for overclocking the bus. The MPC106 came in 89 MHz rated parts on early G3s, but later ones were limited to 66 MHz. The 89 MHz part has significantly more overhead...

Peace,

Drew

Some of the old ones are rated 83MHz, yes. Many of the people I talk to don't seem to know about that, so I thought I might mention it.

Excuse me, yes, 83 MHz. Interestingly, this seems to have been a planned design feature of the G3s as even the Rev A Wallstreets had an 82.9 MHz bus on some models (the 292 MHz model comes to mind). I don't know why Apple backed down on the bus speed for the Gossamer boards. They seem to handle higher bus speeds just fine. Maybe it was an issue with the cost of the parts...

Peace,

Drew

If anybody is interested, I know some interesting tidbits of information concerning clock speed modifications on beige G3s (specifically, ID'ing components to determine whether or not higher bus speeds are possible). It won't work on every beige G3 (usually just the first two revisions), but when it does, it works perfectly. Any interest and I'll put it in the G3 section.

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Why would you not post that information?

If other people knew about it, there would be no point in me saying anything about it. The whole thing is simple, really: just look for the system controller - a small FCBGA microchip on the motherboard (near the processor and memory slots - it looks a lot like the processor, actually). The chip will have writing on it, like this: MPC106ARXxxYY. The YY doesn't matter, but usually it's CG. The xx is what the hopeful overclockers will want to look at: if it's 83 instead of 66, then clock your bus up to 83MHz and rejoice! Your system will run 100% stable and all subsystems will continue working (sometimes overclocking the bus on 66MHz parts resulted in non-functional or unreliable floppy drives).

According to some Apple manuals (some still available on Apple's website with some scrounging around), the beige G3 had a range of frequencies available, some at 50MHz (that's why you'll find some chips with 250 and 275MHz ratings on early models), others faster. I guess they went 66 to keep everything standard and to avoid confusion or having to deal with extra stock.

/edit/ Forgot to mention - make sure you use PC100 RAM if you o/c your bus, or you may have issues.

If other people knew about it, there would be no point in me saying anything about it. The whole thing is simple, really: just look for the system controller - a small FCBGA microchip on the motherboard (near the processor and memory slots - it looks a lot like the processor, actually). The chip will have writing on it, like this: MPC106ARXxxYY. The YY doesn't matter, but usually it's CG. The xx is what the hopeful overclockers will want to look at: if it's 83 instead of 66, then clock your bus up to 83MHz and rejoice! Your system will run 100% stable and all subsystems will continue working (sometimes overclocking the bus on 66MHz parts resulted in non-functional or unreliable floppy drives).According to some Apple manuals (some still available on Apple's website with some scrounging around), the beige G3 had a range of frequencies available, some at 50MHz (that's why you'll find some chips with 250 and 275MHz ratings on early models), others faster. I guess they went 66 to keep everything standard and to avoid confusion or having to deal with extra stock.

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Bumping the clock from 66 to 83 results in about a 26% O/C on the CPU using the stock multiplier. That's a tad high without additional cooling. You'll probably want to knock the multiplier down a bit to keep your CPU cool. Also, how does o/c'ing the system bus to 83mhz affect the timings on the PCI bus? You may end up with problems there, as well.

My G3MT runs on an 83MHz bus, and yes, the processor is lightly overclocked as a result (416MHz instead of 400). I use a socket 7 heatsink with a little fan on it. My G3DT runs on an 83MHz system bus, and its processor runs 333MHz (up from 300MHz). It uses its standard heatsink, though, and I have no problems with it (no extra fans or anything either).

The MPC106 controller is designed to run at a variety of speeds. If you can find the datasheet for it (Freescale doesn't have it, and Tundra Semiconductor doesn't, either, the jerks), you can read for yourself. You may be able to find it at www.datasheet.com. The long and short of it is that the PCI bus runs at 33.3MHz regardless of whether the system bus is at 33.3, 66.6, or 83.3MHz. If one wants to try other speeds (say, 50 or 75MHz system bus), the PCI bus will run at a different speed (keeping with the example, PCI will run at 25MHz).

Is this what you were looking for?

http://tinyurl.com/yrcgl4

You can set the multiplier of the PCI bus independently, so you can change the timing when you change the bus clock. In fact, you can change the bus clock, PCI clock, and CPU multiplier using the same jumper block on all varieties of G3 desktop/tower/AIO (including the B&W).

Takashi Imai's "Mystic Room" is always a good reference:

http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/~t-imai/g3ae1.html

And so is Accelerate Your Macintosh:

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G3_OC/tims.html

I used these instructions to clock up my Rev A G3 MT from 266 to 70 MHz bus, 35 MHz PCI, 315 MHz CPU the day my warranty expired (I didn't want to void it early by removing the tape over the jumper block ). It was rock solid for three years until I got a processor upgrade for the machine and undid the overclock. Though I did get some strange video artifacts on my Voodoo 3 2000 from time to time...

Peace,

Drew

I already have the spec sheet, Quadraman. I had to find it on an alternate website, however, as the links on Freescale transfer to Tundra Semiconductor (the now-owner of the PCI/memory bridge chips from Freescale), and Tundra, like most firms (especially Sony), doesn't like to admit to manufacturing stuff over two years old. Thus, it's difficult to impossible to find the document on their site either.

Those linked pages are probably some of the best for G3 o/c data. I had another one around here somewhere... but those sites don't mention anything about the different controller parts. Thus, one would be going trial and error by simply reading those instructions, whereas if they knew about the part differences, they could simply ID their controller's maximum speed and eliminate the guesswork involved. There's no point in running an 83MHz part at lower speeds, is there?

There may be some main bus <-> PCI bus timing issues that make running at 66 MHz more sensible. I'm no expert, but I would think it would be a simple question to answer with some benchmarks running on the same machine with an 82.9 MHz bus and with a 66.6 MHz bus. Check RAM throughput, disk performance, and ethernet throughput for differences...

Some of the G3 upgrade manufacturers for PCI-class Macs insisted that there were some good reasons for not clocking the bus up to the maximum possible speed (say, 60 MHz for some Macs) and instead sticking with the Apple defined bus speeds between 40 MHz and 50 MHz (and usually somewhere in between like a stupid 45 or 46.5 MHz) claiming that RAM timing didn't work out well for high-speed busses. The argument went something like it would take two cycles on a high-speed bus to perform the same RAM operation that it would take on a 40 MHz bus, so they locked their cards to slower bus speeds. I don't know if the same thing would be true with an 82.9 MHz bus, but that does seem like an odd number to me.

The only drawback to the 82.9 MHz bus Macs of which I'm aware is that they are all Rev A machines with poor graphics (ATI Rage II+DVD/IIc) and no IDE slave device support. A ROM upgrade solves one of those problems, and a video card solves the other...

Peace,

Drew

alright, the jag CD I have is not working. It boots after 10 minutes, but all I get is a blue background with a moveable mouse pointer, and nothing else.

So, I turned it in to an experimental rig for now. I have it running Rhapsody DR2. I have ran the x86 in VPC, but never anything nativly, or the PPC version.

After that, I think I will put a complete install of 9.2.2 on there and go from there. I might just leave it at that and install Office 2k1 and all the other apps. It's really nice now that I have 384mb in there.

-digital