I question this statement in the just-updated blurb on Beige
G3s:
"Although we consider the beige G3 a best buy for the classic
Mac OS, we cannot rate it as highly for OS X, since many features
(SCSI, the floppy drive, GeoPorts, fully accelerated graphics,
etc.) are unsupported...."
The only part I question is "SCSI".
I have a Beige G3 MT, 333 MHz, with Apple-stock UW SCSI PCI card
and 9 GB UW SCSI hard drive, to which I added a 4 GB UW
SCSI drive and memory to 384 MB total. I have OS 10.2 on the
4 GB drive, OS 9.2 on the 9 GB drive. I have an external
Zip drive, Nikon film scanner, and external DVD-RAM drive chained to
the separate motherboard SCSI bus. All these SCSI devices work under
OS X. (Except the Nikon scanner doesn't have an OS X
driver, and I therefore use it only under OS 9. But it's in the
chain while the other devices are in use under OS X.)
(I also have a 2-port PCI USB board, to which are attached a
printer and a flatbed scanner. This scanner also doesn't have an
OS X driver, but does work under Classic.)
I use OS X as the primary environment, and only use OS 9 by
exception (e.g., for the film scanner, which doesn't work under
Classic). And, incidentally, I don't find the OS X performance
objectionable (perhaps because I'm not used to anything faster.)
I'm not sure exactly what I was thinking when I penned those
words in September 2001. (The article was significantly updated
this past week, but that paragraph wasn't touched.) If I recall
correctly, there were a lot of problems with third-party SCSI
cards and drivers for SCSI devices back then, but that's no longer
true.
Regardless, the onboard SCSI has always worked under OS X, so
I've revised that paragraph to remove the outdated reference to a
lack of SCSI support.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
I also find OS X performance generally acceptable on the beige
G3/333, but a fair bit of that is due to adding a faster hard
drive and hard drive controller - as you've done on yours. The
stock drive and slow IDE bus are definitely a bottleneck on the
beige G3.
CoreCrib Not a Good Value
After I concluded that buying a CoreCrib could save money over
picking up a new, used, or refurbished Power Mac G4 in Does Building
Your Own CoreCrib G4 Make Economic Sense?, Peter da Silva writes:
Subject: I don't see the CoreCrib making sense at that
price...
Even going to eBay
a couple of times for components and software, you're looking at
$1,200 for the whole system. If you go with real vendors, add at
least $150 to that. The result is an 800 MHz G4 with no monitor and
no support for the price of a top-end
eMac or entry-level iMac.
For another $150 you can get a brand new 1 GHz G4 direct from Apple
or a 14" iBook.
I could see it at most half that price - or with an OS and
support from Apple. But almost $400 for a case, power supply, and
naked motherboard? Um, I'll pass...
The CoreCrib allows Mac users to do something Apple hasn't let
us do since the era of the Mac
IIci - buy a bare bones computer and build it the way we want
it. Believe me, when I worked at ComputerLand of Grand Rapids, we
sold a lot of SEs, SE/30s,
IIcxs, IIcis, and other Macs
that we ordered in the minimum floppy-only configuration and
upgraded with RAM and third-party hard drives for our
customers.
Not only did this let the customer get exactly the configuration
they wanted and allow the store to generate additional profits
(something sorely lacking in Mac sales these days), but the
third-party memory and drives generally had better warrantees than
Apple products, too.
The CoreCrib isn't competing with the essentially unexpandable
eMac, iMac, or iBook. It's intended for the Mac user who wants
expansion options, and depending on how much can be moved older
from an existing Mac, the cost of a CoreCrib can range from under
US$400 to over US$1,200. It's not for everyone, but I believe
there is a market for this box.
Yes, it would be even better if Apple offered a bare bones G4, but
they seem much more interested in selling fully assembled systems
at a substantial markup (the Power Macs and PowerBooks have the
highest profit margin in the Apple line). Core goes way beyond the
build-to-order options available through the Apple Store, and if
they can tap into a market Apple is ignoring, we all benefit.
More on CoreCrib Value
Andrew W. Hill writes:
"Has it been worth it? I think so. Picking up a used G4/733 or
G4/867 from a dealer would set you back about US$1,500 with less
memory, a smaller hard drive, no ability to watch DVDs, and less
drive bays"
Alternately, you can buy a brand new G4 @ 1 GHz, although with
less memory and a slightly smaller hard drive, but still the ability
to read DVDs and burn CDs also for $1500. While its an easy sell to
claim a $200 savings over the used G4s, it's much harder to say that
building your own system of old parts is worth the $200.
How much you save depends on how much you already have that
can be used in the CoreCrib. Assuming no parts and no copy of the
Mac OS, someone could build an 800 MHz system for $200-300 less
than a comparable new or used Power Mac G4. Whether that's the
best value is up to the individual buyer; I was only making the
case that the CoreCrib can make economic sense.
One benefit I didn't mention in the article is that having
separate DVD-ROM and CD-RW drives probably means you'll be able to
burn CDs a whole lot faster than Apple's Combo drive permits. Even
the 48x and 52x burners have become cheap these days.
I've also since discovered that Core is selling fully
configured systems - just add a copy of the Mac OS - for
as little as $700. Their 800 MHz setup is pretty similar to the
one I came up with, lacking a DVD player, keyboard, mouse, and OS.
It sells for $1,000 and eliminates the need for the end user to
put all the parts together.
Regarding your recent article on May 12th on the iMac channel.
There was a graphics upgrade path for iMac Revisions A and B -
the mezzanine slot. The Micro Conversions (or later, G-Links) iMac
Game Wizard attached to the Mezz slot and featured a Voodoo 2
chipset.
7200 RPM Hard disks do not necessarily make a difference to
performance. I put such a drive as described in your article in my
slot loader iMac - primarily because the original was so noisy. It
was a Maxtor 6 GB 5400 RPM model.
Boot up time and shut down time remained unchanged.
I did file seaches for the character A and set a time limit of
five minutes. A similar search was done with the character B for 2.5
minutes. A very similar number of files was found in both searches in
the alotted times.
The only improvement was searching for an actual word and
measuring the time taken to find all files containing that word. An
average improvement of 15% was measured.
I believe that the IDE bus speed of the early slot loading and
tray loading models prevents exploiting the capabilities of large
cache, 7200 RPM hard disks.
I didn't mention the handful of mezzanine cards made for the
Rev. A and B iMacs because they're pretty rare. Of the millions of
tray-loading iMacs out there, I doubt even thousands of mezzanine
cards (whether video, SCSI, or anything else) were ever sold. A
search of eBay
shows no such cards for sale.
Although I can't find any information on Apple's site about the
IDE bus on the tray-loading iMacs, I strongly suspect that it's
the same 16.67 MBps bus used in the beige G3s. Most drives of that
era couldn't saturate such a bus, but all but the cheapest drives
made in the past three years offer higher throughput that
that.
If you had a 5400 rpm drive, you were better off than some iMac
owners. Apple wanted to keep costs down, so if they could save
money by buying 4400 rpm drives, they did so. Those with 5400 rpm
drives may notice little or no improvement, as you've discovered.
I've updated the page to reflect that Apple sometimes used 4400
rpm drives and sometimes used faster 5400 rpm drives.
Regardless of rotational speed, the buffer can only feed
information as fast as the data bus will accept it, which may
reduce the benefit of a larger cache/buffer, but it won't
eliminate it.
More on the Dash 30fx
David Thornton writes:
Here are three other
photos for you, showing what's behind the front panel (lots of
room for expansion), the I/O panel underneath the top cover (cabling
exits through a gap in the back), and the logic board. The big white
thing in the middle of the innards picture is called the "Doghouse",
and provided cooling for the memory. Apparently the memory supplied
for these babies was rather delicate, and could be cooked pretty
easily. I've got a 14-page Memory Installation Guide that came with
the memory upgrade that was purchased for it.
Since my last note I've spiffed the thing up a bit with a 7.6.1
install and put it back to work running MacDNS for the department. I
was surprised to find it to be a bit more responsive in resolving
domain names than an old Quadra
950 that was pulling DNS duty for us.
Thanks for the photos. I've created a separate page to display
them.
How to tell if a Biege G3 has Rev A ROM
Jeffrey Harris
We have an accelerated (to 500 MHz) Beige G3 with ~500 meg RAM, a
20 gig HD, and a Zip drive in the lab running sys 9.2. I am thinking
about loading Jaguar onto it.
But before doing the work - how do I check the version of its
ROM? Does the presence of the Zip (presumably running in slave mode)
indicate that it is Rev B, not Rev A, already?
Thanks, and keep up the good work.
I can't believe I haven't published that information on Low
End Mac before. There are three ROM revisions for the beige G3.
Rev. A ROMs have a 1997 copyright and were only included with the
Rev. 1 motherboard, which also included ATI Rage II+ video. Rev. B
and C ROMs, which can apparently be installed on the Rev. 1
motherboard to overcome limitations of the Rev. A ROM, have a 1998
copyright.
You can also identify a Rev. 2 motherboard by looking for ATI Rage
Pro video - or use the Apple System Profiler and have the
computer report which video is installed. (At least in more recent
versions of the Mac OS.) The Apple System Profiler will also
report a ROM number. Here's the info to ID the three ROMs:
I'll be updating the beige G3 profiles and the best buy page to
reflect this.
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Dan Knight has been publishing Low
End Mac since April 1997. Mailbag columns come from email responses to his Mac Musings, Mac Daniel, Online Tech Journal, and other columns on the site.
Mac of the Day: iMac G5 (iSight), Oct. 2005 -Apple built an iSight webcam into the last version of the G5 iMac.
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October 12 in LEM history: 98: Beyond HFS+ nightmares - 99: iMacs for all - 00: The future of low-end gaming - 01: Tips on buying a new computer - 05: iMac G5 (iSight) - Simple backup strategies - 06: Bring back flexible, easy to upgrade 'Books - 07: Road Apple nominations - PB 150 boots from Compact Flash - Leopard to slow down PowerPC Macs?
Best Mac Pro Deals, Low End Mac Deals, 10.10.
Used 2.66 GHz 4-core, $1,799; new, $1,949 after rebate; 2.8 4-core, $2,099 shipped; 8-core, $2,599 shipped; 3.0 $3,399 shipped; 3.2, $4,099 shipped.
Best PowerBook G3 Deals, Low End Mac Deals, 10.10.
Used 14" WallStreet G3/266 MHz, $90; Lombard G3/400 MHz, $150; Pismo G3/400 MHz, $300; 500 MHz, $350.
Best Time Capsule and AirPort Deals, Low End Mac Deals, 10.10.
Refurb 500 GB Time Capsule, $249; new, $294; refurb 1 TB, $419; new, $462; AirPort Extreme Card, $39; Base Station, $159; Express, $60.
Modding Your Old Mac to Make It More Useful, Phil Herlihy, The Usefulness Equation, 10.09.
If your old Mac is too slow, too noisy, too plain looking, or has too little room for expansion, you might want to mod it.
Best iMac G4 Deals, Low End Mac Deals, 10.09.
Used 15" 700 MHz CD-RW, $269; 800 Combo, $300; 1 GHz, $390; 17" 1.25 GHz SuperDrive, $400; 20", $529.
Best 15" MacBook Pro Deals, Low End Mac Deals, 10.09.
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Best Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger' Deals, Low End Mac Deals, 10.09.
DVD upgrade from 10.3, $75; upgrade bundle with 10.3, $118; full version, $129; family pack, $200; 10-user Server, $350; unlimited, $400.
Migrating My Law Office from Windows to Macintosh, Andrew J Fishkin, Best Tools for the Job, 10.08.
By switching to Leopard Server, everyone in the office will be able to move to a Mac - but which ones will best meet their needs?
Low End Mac Needs Help Moving to Joomla, Dan Knight, Mac Musings, 10.08.
We've settled on Joomla as the content management system that should work very well for Low End Mac, but we're running stuck with templates.
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