Low End Mac Reader Specials

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Power Macintosh

Power Macintosh G3 Index

Models

Beige G3s

The first Power Mac G3 was introduced on November 15, 1997 as a replacement for the Power Mac 7300 desktop, 8600 minitower, and 9600 tower. The new G3 CPU was significantly more efficient than the PowerPC 603e and 604e. Macworld's SpeedMark found it to be about 22% more powerful than the 604e at the same CPU speed.

The beige G3 came in desktop and minitower configurations that looked very much like the Power Mac 7300 and a shortened Power Mac 8600. The G3 has a 66 MHz system bus vs. 40-50 MHz in earlier Power Macs and uses 233 and 266 MHz CPUs.

This was the first time Apple's top-end Macs shipped with IDE drives as standard, rather than the SCSI drives Apple had supported since 1986. The 16.7 MBps IDE bus was considered fast at that time, and the stock IDE drive held its own against SCSI drives in the new Power Mac G3.

The new design was not without its teething pains. Models with Rev. 1 motherboards and Rev. A ROMs don't support drives in slave mode, although OS X overcomes that limitation. However, OS X has its own restrictions on the beige G3, the biggest being an inability to boot OS X from a partition over 8 GB in size, and that had to be the first one on the drive.

Maximum RAM is 768 MB, so it can be a decent OS X machine. Mac OS 8.0 through 10.2.x are fully supported, and 10.3-10.4 can be installed using XPostFacto. OS X 10.2 and 10.3 are probably the best versions for the G3 Power Macs.

Faster

The speed bumped second generation Power Mac G3 used 300, 333, and 366 MHz G3 CPUs, although the 366 MHz model was fairly rare. And where the original G3 had supported a 512 KB level 2 cache, 1 MB was an option on the newer model.

Other than offering more power, the 1998 model has the same limitations as the original Power Mac G3.

All-in-One

Apple designed the Power Mac G3 All-in-One for the education market. It replaced the 225 MHz and 250 MHz Power Mac 5500 and provided three PCI slots for expansion.

The built-in 15" display supported resolutions to 1024 x 768, and the 233-266 MHz speed makes it a great machine with the classic Mac OS and a decent performer with OS X 10.2 or 10.3. (It has the same restrictions on OS X installs as the other beige G3s.)

Blue & White G3s

Even after the roaring success of the colorful iMac, which was the best selling personal computer model month after month in 1998, nobody expected that Apple would redesign the Power Mac with a colorful plastic enclosure - but they did.

The Blue & White Power Mac G3 had the expected hardware improvements: faster CPUs (300-450 MHz), a faster system bus (100 MHz), faster IDE busses (33 MBps and 66 MBps vs. 16.7 MBps), room for more RAM (1 GB), more internal drive bays, and one more PCI slot.

Innovations include a 66 MHz PCI slot for the ATI Rage 128 video card, an optional DVD-RAM drive, USB and FireWire ports, and no internal floppy drive. (There's also an ADB port for legacy mice and keyboards.)

Yosemite designBut the biggest innovation was probably the case itself. The motherboard was connected to one side, which came down like a drawbridge when you needed to work inside the computer. This clever design was used through the entire range of G4 Power Macs.

The Blue & White G3 is a far better OS X machine than the beige G3s, as it has a faster system bus, a faster drive bus, and doesn't have the 8 MB partition issue that earlier G3s had with IDE drives. The Rage 128 is a nice enough video card, and it's trivially simple to upgrade to a modern PCI Radeon video card.

Although Mac OS X 10.4 is fully supported, the general consensus is that 10.3.x is more appropriate for the hardware.

Curiously, the Blue & White has two ATA busses that run at different speeds - and by default it uses the faster one for the optical drive. The ATA33 bus normally used for hard drives doesn't support drives over 128 GB in size, but the ATA66 bus (normally used for the CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, or DVD-RAM) does.

Online Resources

Cautions

Go to Power Mac index or Low End Mac home page.

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