thinking of upgrading...

[G3-Pwnz-G4]

i have a blue and white g3, and i can't decide whether to pay $270 for a 900mhz g3 zif card, or $330 for a 533mhz g4 zif card. i also can't decide on a new grahpics card.

any insight on which would give a bigger performance boost, mostly in the gaming and photoshop category, would be greatly appreciated.

 

[scem0]

that g3 pwnz that g4 .

But seriously, get the g3.

scem0

 

[applemacdude]

For the video card get the Radeon Mac Edition from ebay. It will usually cost between 90-130 dollars and its better than the Radeon 7000 which cost 120 bucks. The Blue and White g3 is pci so those are the only ones you can get. The Radeon mac edition is better at gaming than the 7000 but i think the 700 has adc .

As for the zif card i think that the 900mhz will win the 533 G4, which brand are the cards?

 

[lmalave]

Hate to tell ya, but you probably won't see a huge performance difference either way. I think the bottleneck is the 66 MHz bus. My girlfriend had a beige 266 MHz G3 that I helped her upgrade with a faster/bigger hard drive, more memory, firewire/usb card, and the piece de resistance, a 500 MHz G4 upgrade. Even though the MHz was almost twice as much, the machine wasn't really *that* much faster. I would recommend that you just keep saving your money for a new machine.

 

[tomf87]

Originally posted by lmalave
Hate to tell ya, but you probably won't see a huge performance difference either way. I think the bottleneck is the 66 MHz bus. My girlfriend had a beige 266 MHz G3 that I helped her upgrade with a faster/bigger hard drive, more memory, firewire/usb card, and the piece de resistance, a 500 MHz G4 upgrade. Even though the MHz was almost twice as much, the machine wasn't really *that* much faster. I would recommend that you just keep saving your money for a new machine.

Well the G3 B&W has a 100 Mhz bus. On a 66Mhz bus, the mainboard still runs at 66Mhz, but the proc can run at 100Mhz due to a change in frequency on the adapter the proc is on. Since you're running a processor designed for 100Mhz at 66Mhz, I think that is were you're seeing the lackluster performance.

Since the G3 B&W already runs at 100Mhz, I think the upgrade would be beneficial.

 

[bousozoku]

I went for the PowerLogix 800 MHz G3 upgrade for my B&W G3/400 and I'm quite happy with it. I've also considered the original ATI Radeon card although the 7000 is available new.

I would not suggest the 900 MHz upgrade at this point, as I was told that PowerLogix is having trouble with it. I also would not suggest a G4 card because of the overall throughput.

This has also been addressed recently in two other threads so you might want to do a search.

 

[rhpenguin]

Upgrading is not the answer... For the money you put into that machine you could most likely buy a used Powermac G4 from your favourite mac retailer...

but i would go for the G3 card if upgrading is your only option...

 

[G3-Pwnz-G4]

well, to max out my blue and white would cost about $450-550. thats with a new cpu card, 1gig ram, and a radeon. a used g4 would no way have that much stuff for that amount of money. that's why i'm considering upgrading instead of buying a used g4.

 

[rhpenguin]

well... you could always check ebay...

 

[G3-Pwnz-G4]

...well duh...i was talking about ebay. in reality, the prices there aren't much cheaper than buying a brand new computer.