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New Parts for PM G3

yoyo5280

yoyo5280

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Feb 24, 2007
1,910
0
Melbourne, Australia & Bay Area
My friend and I found a Power Mac g3 at our school campus in the dumpster. He took it home and had a play around the insides. We want to get it working again, but need a bit of help a)finding the right parts. We want to be able to run Tiger or maybe even Leopard! B) and finding those parts in tokyo and lastly C) being able to buy them with our pocket money.

Any help is apreciated! Thanks!
 
You won't be able to run Leopard supported (you will probably be able to actually install and use it, though). Here is what you can do with it, assuming it is a b/w (tower with a blue/green outer door/back wall):

Up the RAM to 1gb--will take 4X256mb PC100 sticks of RAM. May take PC133. Will NOT take 512mb sticks.

Up the processor--it is a ZIF processor than can be easily removed and replaced; I believe the G3 chipset goes up to 1gHz, and there are G4 replacements that go up to, I think, 550mHz (possibly higher, this is based on the last time I looked around).

HDDs--it will take any IDE drives; you may want to put in a SATA PCI card, since to install and use a drive above 128gb requires a PCI controller, and why bother with IDE when you can get SATA? Other than cost, of course, as the performance difference in a b/w is going to be less noticeable due to the bus speed.

Add more cooling--there's room to stick an extra fan or two, and if you replace the ZIF processor, you'll probably want an extra fan. You can also use a PCI-slot exhaust fan, those tend to work well with the b/w.

Any G3 or G4 processor for that machine will run Tiger, but you'll want at least 512mb of RAM. To check for what is available, you can try Other World Computing (macsales.com). Have fun!
 
Surprisingly, it came loaded with a large amount of RAM. But it has been rained on before. It is not the Steve one that is blue and white. It is the beige one
g3-beige-reva-outsideview.jpg
. BLA!

I want to paint the case white. :p

We don't think it is safe to plug in, so.... what should we do?
 
yoyo5280 said:
Surprisingly, it came loaded with a large amount of RAM. But it has been rained on before. It is not the Steve one that is blue and white. It is the beige one
g3-beige-reva-outsideview.jpg
. BLA!

I want to paint the case white. :p

We don't think it is safe to plug in, so.... what should we do?
Click to expand...

Open up the case, disassemble it & set up a small fan (or heater on low) to blow air over the internal parts for a day or 2 to dry them out (especially the power supply & mobo).

IF it did not get completely submerged in water but only rained upon, once it is 1000% dry insides it should be fine.......

then follow the tips already posted

custom paint job (stripes/flames etc) = 1 kewl mac :D
but white sux as a 'puter color.....will look even more like a plain-jain-pos-peecee boxen + it shows dirt/dust big time !
 
white was an example, I want it to look slick. Real slick. Lol, and kinda retro cause its old lol. What a good name? Would it at all be possible to put a custom designed logo on it?

Lol!!!!!!! THIS THING IS GONA BE SICK!!!!

Anyways, I don't think were geeky enough to do it our self. Any instructions are welcome. . THANKS!
 
Ok, for the beige G3 there are options, but there aren't as many as for the b/w. Check the list at OWC/Macsales, I know Sonnet makes processor upgrades for the beige. No idea how much luck you'll have with the RAM or what the max is, but lowendmac.com will have all that info for you, just search for your model in the specs section. Good luck, and let us know how it turns out!
 
Nope, sorry. The closest I ever owned was a performa 6200. But if the basic structure is the same, there should be a series of screws on the bottom. Unscrew them and the chassis should just slide out the back.

Otherwise, google around for a visual guide, I'm sure one exists somewhere.
 
You'll need cd versions of OSX (or a compatible DVD drive). Depending on your model, there are some tricks to installing OSX. First off, you'll need to figure out which model you have. For example, the G3 233 lists this as requirements for Jaguar (or Panther with XPostFacto3, which you can get here:

If you have a hard drive over 8 GB in size, you must partition it. The partition containing OS X must be within the first 8 GB of space or you will not be able to run OS X. (If you are creating the partion within OS X, it must be 7.45 GB or smaller as reported by Disk Utility, because sometimes a GB is billion bytes and sometimes it's 1,073,741,824 bytes.)

You can only boot OS X from a "master" drive in the beige G3. This applies to hard drives and CD-ROM drives. If the CD-ROM is set to slave, you will not be able to install OS X. If the hard drive is set to slave, you will not be able to boot from it.

Non-Apple upgrades and peripherals (such as unsupported USB devices, replacement drives, and third-party memory) may cause problems when installing or booting into Mac OS X.

Be sure to read and follow Apple's "Read Before You Install" instructions to increase the likelihood of getting OS X installed and running on the first try.

The beige G3 is not officially supported under OS X 10.3 (Panther), but it does work with 10.2.8 and earlier. Panther can be installed using XPostFacto 3, although built-in video is not currently supported.
Click to expand...

Once you figure out your model, find it on lowendmac and read through the specs and such.

http://lowendmac.com/ppc/index.shtml

Also, according to the articles I've read, the beige G3s are can be upgraded to G4s.
 
The easiest will be Jaguar (X10.2), but I had good luck using Xpostfacto with Panther on an old machine.

Mostly it looks like it could be a lot of fun modding up that G3, and I'm a little jealous, as since I got the G5 my modding days are pretty much gone.
 
I used to own one of these, and yes, it could run 10.2 but had some issues. First of all, it refused to boot from the 10.2 CD. I had to use XPostFacto to start the installer, although I didn't actually "XPostFactoify" the resulting installation on the hard drive.

I also had random crashes after updating to 10.2.8 and some documents online indicated the 10.2.6 is the last version that runs reliably.
 
Nermal said:
I used to own one of these, and yes, it could run 10.2 but had some issues. First of all, it refused to boot from the 10.2 CD. I had to use XPostFacto to start the installer, although I didn't actually "XPostFactoify" the resulting installation on the hard drive.

I also had random crashes after updating to 10.2.8 and some documents online indicated the 10.2.6 is the last version that runs reliably.
Click to expand...

Did you read up on the model? Some of the beige G3s have a master/slave issue where you can never boot from a slave drive, so to boot from a CD you'd need to change the jumper settings on your HDD and cd-rom, then change them back once the install was completed...
 
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