PowerMac G3 Video Card Upgrade

[danols15]

Hello All,

I am planning (yet another) upgrade to my trusty old G3. I want to put a mid-range video card into it. I want something that is PCI, at least 32 megs VRAM, and fairly cheep. I just want to bring the video capability back up a bit.

 

[roker]

Hello All,

I am planning (yet another) upgrade to my trusty old G3.

Out of interest, what are the current upgrades you have made to this? I bought a B&W G3 in Jan this year with the intention of upgrading it, without looking into it too much I put a 320gb HDD into it & a "MSI" DVD-RW drive. Neither worked & I sold it on because it was too loud & bulky, & I didn't know enough about it to get around the problems.

Cheers

 

[jMc]

I put a 64MB Radeon 7000 in mine. It's a flashed PC card, but it works flawlessly (with VGA, DVI and s-video out), and with PCI Extreme, you can even enable Quartz acceleration. These cards are readily available on ebay for about $40, and they're probably the best card you can put in such an old machine before it gets pointless.

If you can stretch to G4 Zif upgrade as well (I put a 550 into mine, and the difference was astounding) and max out the Ram (1GB I think), then this is a very worthwhile little machine.

For support of drives over 120GB you'll likely need a PCI IDE controller (I was lucky as mine already had one installed when i bought it second hand). I good place to check out upgrade info on older macs is http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ - lots of good advice there.

jx

Edited to say - sorry, i assumed you meant a B&W G3, but if you mean an earlier beige G3, the above may not be valid.

 

[danols15]

Upgrades

Thanks!

Roker-
my G3 B&W is currently 1GB RAM DVDRW, ATA133, 80GB HDD 1GHZ G4 ZIF upgrade CPU.

The B&W and other classic machines are VERY picky about hardware. The 320 GB drive did not work because I think these can not see drives over 120...or 137GB, one or the other. ALSO... without adding ATA100/133, your drive would bottleneck any performance that you could have if it was an IDE drive. My machine is the Dreaded REV. 1 Yosemite, and has ATA33 for IDE. Kinda sucky if you want to boot from an ide drive. I used SCSI but recently picked up an IDE controller card. I had several Spare DVD RWs laying around and gave several a try and by chance, the Classic firmware noticed one. Its
kind of hit or miss if you don't get something designed for the mac.

jMC-

Thank you very much I will be looking for one of those!

Thanks,
Danols