Yosemite design Power Macintosh

Blue & White Power Macintosh G3/300-450

code name: Yosemite

nickname: Smurf

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Bold best summarizes the blue & white G3. With an entirely new minitower case design and huge graphics on the side, this Mac would stand out even without the bright color.

In a big step forward, these models have 4 PCI slots, one more than previous models, and the B&W G3 was the first computer to ship with copper CPU technology (used in the 350 MHz to 450 MHz models).

With a tip of the hat to the iMac, the B&W G3 doesn't have a built-in floppy drive.

The keyboard and mouse also come from the iMac. Users had mixed reactions to the round mouse; fortunately, there are plenty of good alternatives. Likewise, although the keyboard has a nice feel, it is missing some keys that Apple has provided on full sized keyboard for years (see iMac's Keyboard: The Missing Keys for a full list). The availability of standard layout keyboards from Apple and others means you don't have to live with the stock keyboard.

As on the iMac, USB has practically replaced ADB, but Apple left one ADB port on the B&W G3 for legacy peripherals. The addition of FireWire provides a fast alternative to the missing SCSI. (SCSI PCI cards are readily available, allowing access to SCSI hardware.) Although this model has FireWire and USB ports (see Apple Knowledge Base Article #58430, USB Info and Benefits of Dual-Channel USB), it cannot boot from either. Also, it does not support FireWire Target Disk Mode.

Unfortunately, this Power Macintosh G3 shares the same product name as the earlier, very different beige Power Macintosh G3. You'd think Apple might have learned a thing or two about product name confusion with the PowerBook G3/PowerBook G3 Series situation, but that isn't the case.

The Rev. 2 B&W G3 uses a different motherboard, has an additional drive bracket, incorporates a new IDE controller chip (marked 402) that supports UDMA-33, and includes a faster version of the ATI Rage 128 video card. 350 MHz and 400 MHz models may have either motherboard; 450 MHz versions only shipped from the factory with the Rev. 2 board. The improved IDE controller supports the standard master/slave drive configuration and solves a drive corruption problem. The Rev. 1 board isn't stable with many modern hard drives on the built-in IDE bus because the controller doesn't support UDMA (Mac OS X does an end run around this problem by disabling UDMA on the Rev. 1 motherboard).

A common suggestion in the old days was to put the hard drive on the 16.7 MBps ATA-3 bus used by the optical drive, but the Rev. 1 motherboard doesn't support booting from hard drives on that bus. See the Wikipedia article about the Blue & White G3 for a lot more information about Rev. 1 failings.

When buying a blue & white G3, insist on getting a Revision 2 system. The best way to make sure you're getting a Rev. 2 motherboard is the "402" marking on the CMD646 IDE controller chip. See Accelerate Your Mac! for more details on differences between these motherboard revisions.

Although this model doesn't support drives larger than 128 GB on its main 33 MHz drive bus, the 16.7 MHz bus used for the optical drive supports multi-word DMA 2 and may support larger hard drive.

The Upgrade Box

Details

Mac OS

Core System

  • Graphics
    • GPU: ATI Rage 128 on 66 MHz bus, supports resolutions to 1600 x 1200 with 32-bit support, VGA output (replaces older DB-15 port Apple has used since 1987). Rev. 1 runs graphics processor at 75 MHz, while Rev. 2 uses faster 90-100 MHz clock. Some educational units came with a Rage Pro video card that supported video capture.
    • VRAM: 16 MB
  • Drives

    • Expansion

    Physical

    Accelerators & Upgrades

    Online Resources

    Cautions

    <go to Power Mac index or LEM home page>

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