Upgrading Beige PM G3

[Paul550]

Greetings!

I am planing on putting some life back into my good ol' G3, and I have a fewquestions about the upgrade. First I want to put a decent video card into it, since I have never really had a good gaming computer. However, the video card that is in there is more or less "built-in." If I put a video card into an empty PCI slot, will it conflict with the factory card?

Also, I plan on putting in a Sonnet ZIF 1 Ghz G4 processor and I have read in a few places some things about jumper settings, etc. Is there a limit to the speed that I can upgrade this machine to due to the jumper settings?

 

[Horrortaxi]

Don't worry about the video card. You won't get good gaming anyway.

Not sure about jumpers on the upgrade card, but no matter what you can clock it at, you'll still have a 66mhz system bus so you won't have the same performance as a proper 1ghz system.

For what you're planning to spend on upgrades you'd be able to buy a new eMac and get the system you're trying to turn this one into.

 

[Paul550]

I thought about doing that, but i dont like the eMac cause they are too big and bulky and heavy - for a dorm room. I had planned on hooking up a flatscreen monitor to the G3. I dont care if its PERFECT for gaming (thats what my PS2 is for) i just want it fairly decent. Also, Pioneer has a new DVD burner out (DVR-107) which supports DVD+R/W which i had planned on installing. Apple still lacks this in all of its products.

 

[Duff-Man]

Duff-Man says...I would have to more or less agree - look carefully at what you are spending against what you can get new/used for the same (or just a bit more) money. But to answer the question - putting a video card in a pci slot will work just fine...but as said, don't expect to run all the latest games that way as it is older PCI and not AGP no matter what card you eventually use....oh yeah!

 

[Horrortaxi]

What games do you want to play on your upgraded G3? I can't say for certain that it won't run anything current, but I have serious doubts.

Let's do some math. Maybe seeing it written will make an impact.
The upgrade processor costs $400. A video card will run you $130. That's $530 so far. Have you upgraded the hard drive or RAM? Add another $200 if you haven't. Then you're talking about a DVD burner that will cost at least another $100 and won't have full Mac OS support. You might want to plug things into the G3, so add another $50 for a combo USB/Firewire card. You're close to $900 on upgrades and you still won't (probably) be able to do what you want with it. $900 is also the cost of a new Superdrive equipped eMac with education discount. Also, check ebay because $900 will buy a nice used Mac.

 

[MacinDoc]

Don't do it!

Although I've upgraded my beige desktop over the years with cheap parts purchased on eBay, I agree that the upgrade to a 1 GHz G4 probably isn't worth the money, considering the price of the eMac. Even with overclocking, I'm unaware of any way to increase the bus speed past 83 MHz, and this may void the warranty of the ZIF upgrade. Furthermore, the backside cache on the 1 GHz upgrade ZIF is only 4:1, so the performance increase won't be quite what you would expect. Also, as Duff-Man and Horrortaxi pointed out, PCI graphics just aren't sufficient for the games currently out there (even SimThemePark is ploddingly slow), and DVD encoding is not supported for beige G3s in OS X. Finally, Panther will not even run on a beige G3 without a software hack.

I've come to the painful conclusion that my "Old Faithful" G3 has outlived its usefulness to me , and I'm hoping that Apple will have something special waiting for me at Expo Paris next month (not that I'll actually be in Paris, mind you ).

BTW, if you still do decide to do the upgrade, all of the 1 GHz ZIFs I've looked at have not required any changes to be made to the jumpers, but my 533 MHz ZIF did. You can find a list of the jumper settings for slower ZIFs here.

(Please excuse my compulsive smilies...)

 

[Paul550]

Thanks for the responces.

I think I will take your advice and just buy a good G4 off of eBay. I would do the eMac, but I want to get a flatscreen monitor too, that way I can stash the CPU below the desk. Besides, I can still stick that Pioneer drive I want into the G4!