G3 Pro: Good Enough?

Dan Knight - 12 January 1999

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"Now, time for an encore to keep Apple two steps ahead of Microsoft, Intel, and all those clone makers."

Those were the words that closed last week's pre-Macworld article, 1998: Apple Sells the Sizzle. And I guess Apple answered that question quite clearly on the iMac and Power Mac fronts (more on the new iMacs in Beyond Bondi).

Power Mac G3 Pro

The new blue-and-white Power Mac G3 has a stunning appearance, although some may say Apple has gone too far Yosemite design in using these colors on a professional computer. Unfortunately, Apple didn't really come up with a new name, so I've adopted the title G3 Pro for the newest Power Mac.

Why pro? First, because the tower configuration is designed for graphics professionals. The ATI Rage 128 video subsystem (with 16 MB VRAM!) smokes anything else on the market, and putting it in a 66 MHz PCI slot makes it even more responsive. And even with the ATI card installed, the G3 Pro has three 64-bit PCI slots available for expansion.

The motherboard itself is faster, running at 100 MHz, just like a lot of the hot new Wintel boxes. That and up to 1GB of PC100 memory will let the G3 Pro hold its own against any Celeron II, Pentium II, or Xeon box.

Apple had embraced three more industry standards with the G3 Pro: FireWire (which Apple invented), PC100 memory, and the VGA monitor connector. No more need to buy Mac-specific monitors or adapters for third-party monitors.

Learning a lesson from the iMac, Apple retained the ADB port on the G3 Pro, allowing use of dongles, color calibrators, and other hardware devices the graphics professional may already own. And, of course, a real extended keyboard and a decent mouse - to replace the iMac keyboard and mouse, which I cannot consider professional.

Although the G3 Pro matches the iMac in not offering SCSI as a standard feature, one can easily install a PCI SCSI card ($50 and up) for access to older drives.

Gone is the 56k modem, which is fine for home computers but makes little sense on an ethernet network. (Speaking of ethernet, the G3 Pro supports 10Base-T and the faster 100Base-T.)

It already looks like the G3 Pro will take the same CPU upgrades as the older Power Mac G3, so as those upgrades pass the 400 MHz mark, owners will be able to speed them further.

Evaluation

I work for a publisher, where we have Macs ranging from the IIsi through the Power Mac G3/266. I'm looking forward to the G3 Pro, as are several of the users I support.

The biggest reason, of course, is speed. Starting with a 300 MHz model at $1,599, the G3 Pro is faster than all but two of the computers we already own (a 7300 and an 8500 upgraded with 300 MHz G3 cards). Add to that the 100 MHz motherboard, compared with 50 MHz in most of our older Macs, and the 128-bit ATI graphics card with 16 MB of video memory (our top machines today have 4 MB, which limits 1280 x 1024 display to 16 bits), and even the entry level G3 Pro should be an absolute screamer.

The G3 Pro/300 only has a 512 KB backside cache, making it about 7% slower than the earlier G3/300 it replaces, but that difference will vanish behind the faster video.

Taking the entry level G3 Pro with an extra 128 MB of memory and a SCSI card, this should make a very nice, under-US$2,000 replacement for the designers, whether they're on 180 MHz 604e systems (mine), 233-266 MHz G3 systems, or upgraded systems with 250-300 MHz G3 daughter cards.

If it looks a bit gaudy, at least it'll work with our Apple and MicroSpeed extended keyboards, our Logitech trackballs, our Kensington mice, our sketch tablet, our color calibrator, and whatever other ADB devices we may have. And the SCSI card will let us use our essential Zip drives, along with external Jaz drives, hard drives, and a scanner.

Apple took the best of the iMac, merged it with the best of the Power Mac, encased it in their best case yet, and created a forward looking model with great backward compatibility.

In my book, that makes it a guaranteed winner.

PowerPC's last chance: The Mac's history with the G5 CPU, 06.24. The introduction of the G5 Power Mac in June 2003 promised a bright 3 GHz future, and failure to achieve that paved the way to today's Intel Macs.
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