I have always personally wanted to take an old g3 machine, (a snow white model) gut it, and mount a 15" lcd with either a mini or a hackintosh inside. New performance, but still the old form factor.
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Upgrade of imac G3 pink 400MHz to G4
- Thread starter Cabbit
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haha I like your thinking outside of the box - what about the LCD screen with some way of mounting a mac mini inside.... is this going too far with this?
I think someone has tried this. I know someone did it with an old black and white 1990 Macintosh Plus driven by a Mac Mini.
That would be an interesting thing to do -- I think some iMac G4 owners have wanted to do it, too. On the iMac G4, there is some problem re wiring the LCD screen to the mini's video output.
I had a quick google search and saw someone had done something similar:
http://www.kaede.sakura.ne.jp/~kidou/mac/macmini01.html
Looks awesome although the only thing I would say is I'm not particularly electronic savvy and I've read a lot of warnings around the CRT screen electrocuting you which sounds painful and at worse fatal! Is there no way of using the CRT on the iMac G3 simply as a monitor and hook the mac mini up that way? Mine has a VGA out in the back for monitor mirroring....??
http://www.kaede.sakura.ne.jp/~kidou/mac/macmini01.html
Looks awesome although the only thing I would say is I'm not particularly electronic savvy and I've read a lot of warnings around the CRT screen electrocuting you which sounds painful and at worse fatal! Is there no way of using the CRT on the iMac G3 simply as a monitor and hook the mac mini up that way? Mine has a VGA out in the back for monitor mirroring....??
Good question. All iMac G3s have VGA out. Try asking the question at lowendmac.
As to the CRT killing you, I've opened them lots of times. Just do the static strap thing and don't touch the back of the CRT. Google around, I think it would be more fun to put a mini inside the iMac case and use the screen and the dvd/cd slot with the mini.
Calling someone about one of those tomorrow actually.
Not sure if I'm going to just use Leopard on it or actually do the mods.It was a 700mhz eMac, and I just decided against it. I'm a very indecisive person.
@verveguitar:
an imac g3 (even 400MHz) will run 10.4.11 better than 10.3.9, as long as you have at least about 384MB memory. Why? 10.4 is more efficient than 10.3, except in minimum memory requirements.
i had a whole lab of them running 10.4, including imovie 5. just upgraded them to eMacs.
if you're not too attached to the iMac, the eMacs are a great deal now. schools have upgraded to other things, dumping them by the boatload. easy to find a 1GHz eMac G4 for $100 or so. will be >way< faster than an iMac G3, plus has a 17" screen. noisier, though (due to fan).
an imac g3 (even 400MHz) will run 10.4.11 better than 10.3.9, as long as you have at least about 384MB memory. Why? 10.4 is more efficient than 10.3, except in minimum memory requirements.
i had a whole lab of them running 10.4, including imovie 5. just upgraded them to eMacs.
if you're not too attached to the iMac, the eMacs are a great deal now. schools have upgraded to other things, dumping them by the boatload. easy to find a 1GHz eMac G4 for $100 or so. will be >way< faster than an iMac G3, plus has a 17" screen. noisier, though (due to fan).
They are a great deal because their capacitors blow up. Be careful. The iMac G3s are rock solid old workhorses, except for the problematic dvd/cd slot drives. I'd rather find a G4 upgrade kit for an old iMac G3 than an eMac.
Grumble - just finished writing a reply, and lost it ...
Here goes an abbreviated reply ...
- i agree, the iMac G3's are real workhorses. if you need basic computing, they're great. if you like to tinker, and can find a g4 upgrade cheap, then go for it. but the fastmac upgrade (550mhz G4) is $200. maybe good 2 or 3 years ago, but seems a lot for that now.
- my 9 emacs have been going for almost a year, no problems. YMMV, of course. i imagine that most of them that were going to develop the capacitor problem would have by now, and either been fixed (under apple's extended warranty for this issue), or junked.
a 1Ghz (or faster) emac is going to be at least twice as fast as that upgraded iMac, plus bigger screen, and USB 2 on later models. much more machine, for not much money (just saw a 1.25Ghz emac on craigslist in SF for $60). so, i think for the average person, this is going to be a better solution.
on the other hand, iMac G3's are almost free now !!!
great little computers these iMac g3's
i have a snow white 700mhz model here and a 600 mhz model
i disabled spotlight which takes ram and disabled dashboard in tiger which takes ram too and it plays youtube videos ,but the ones which are marked as HD and done for flashplayer 10 are a bit choppy ,so i just ignore videos in HD and watch the normal ones and it works fine in flashplayer 9
dont try the flashplayer 10, it takes over the whole iMac chews on it and spits it out
still have another
..not so good 600mhz model which doesnt work proper any more ..no clue why i guess the analogue board of the screen will go soon ,rainbow colors on screen and picture is shaking in corners until its warmed up, the rainbow colors disappear after 2-3 restarts, so my guess is it doesnt demagnatize proper any more,also the inner bezel is chipped in one corner ,one speaker isnt working proper , but apart from that its flying i somehow cant bring myself to rip it apart , feel so sorry for it
i have a snow white 700mhz model here and a 600 mhz model
i disabled spotlight which takes ram and disabled dashboard in tiger which takes ram too and it plays youtube videos ,but the ones which are marked as HD and done for flashplayer 10 are a bit choppy ,so i just ignore videos in HD and watch the normal ones and it works fine in flashplayer 9
dont try the flashplayer 10, it takes over the whole iMac chews on it and spits it out
still have another
..not so good 600mhz model which doesnt work proper any more ..no clue why i guess the analogue board of the screen will go soon ,rainbow colors on screen and picture is shaking in corners until its warmed up, the rainbow colors disappear after 2-3 restarts, so my guess is it doesnt demagnatize proper any more,also the inner bezel is chipped in one corner ,one speaker isnt working proper , but apart from that its flying i somehow cant bring myself to rip it apart , feel so sorry for it
...I bought an iMac G3 Snow from ebay for £60 which has 10.4.11 and it is amazing. Got microsoft office, photoshop, the works on it. Also as it's 10.4 I can connect my iPhone to it. Not as fast as my eMac but the retro iMac look is so cool. Very happy
i dont know where this myth comes from that iMac g3's dont play youtube
my 2 iMacs both play youtube videos with flashplayer 8 flawless , to run flashplayer 9 i had to disable flashlight and the dashboard , go down to thousand of colors instead of millions
(you will not notice the difference) and choose a solid color desktop ,in order to free up enough graphic power to get them to play flash content, but they play nicely every youtube video that is not HD ,
therefor you would need flashplayer 10 , and that simply does not work even if you upgrade the processor to a g4 in the iMac g3 ,as it needs 128mb vram graphics card in order to work half decent , it works in software mode or how they call it if you have less
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/systemreqs/
my 2 iMacs both play youtube videos with flashplayer 8 flawless , to run flashplayer 9 i had to disable flashlight and the dashboard , go down to thousand of colors instead of millions
(you will not notice the difference) and choose a solid color desktop ,in order to free up enough graphic power to get them to play flash content, but they play nicely every youtube video that is not HD ,
therefor you would need flashplayer 10 , and that simply does not work even if you upgrade the processor to a g4 in the iMac g3 ,as it needs 128mb vram graphics card in order to work half decent , it works in software mode or how they call it if you have less
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/systemreqs/
here is the geekbench score of a G4 550 converted iMac g3
t scored 361 on Geekbench:
Integer:
Processor integer performance
381
Floating Point:
Processor floating point performance
475
Memory:
Memory performance
239
Stream
Memory bandwidth performance
140
System Information:
Operating System - Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Build 8S165)
Model - PowerMac2,1
Motherboard - PowerMac2,1
Processor - PowerPC
Processor ID - 800ch
Processors - 1
Threads - 1
Cores - 1
Memory - 1.00 GB* PC100-322S SDRAM
Processor Frequency - 550 MHz
Bus Frequency - 99.9 MHz
L1 Instruction Cache - 32.0 KB
L1 Data Cache - 32.0 KB
L2 Cache - 512 KB
L3 Cache - 0.00 B
from another post here in the collectors forum
and here is the score of my iMac g3 700mhz
http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view/221570 so the g4 is clearly faster ..and i guess in real world and with apps that support altivec really faster