Second Class Macs are Apple's somewhat compromised
hardware designs. For the most part, they're not really bad - simply
designs that didn't meet their full potential. (On our rating scale,
the more brown apples, the worse the hardware.)
Apple used two different motherboards on the
beige Power Mac G3. Only the Revision 1 motherboard, which uses the
Revision A ROM, deserves a Road Apple rating.
What distinguishes the Rev. 1 G3 from Rev. 2 and 3? The biggest
difference is that the Rev. A ROM doesn't support the use of slave
drives, which was a common characteristic of earlier Macs that
supported IDE drives. This really cut into the ability to put drives in
all the drive bays unless one was also willing to buy a third-party IDE
controller.
You can use the Apple System Profiler to identify which ROM version
you have:
- Rev. 1: $77D.40F2
- Rev. 2: $77D.45F1
- Rev. 3: $77D.45F2
We should note that Mac OS X partially addresses this limitation.
Although a Rev. 1 model cannot boot from a slave drive, once the
computer is booted into Mac OS X it is able to access slave
drives.
Because of the inability to boot from a slave drive - even in
OS X - it is imperative that the hard drive and CD-ROM both be
configured as masters. Failure to do so will make it impossible to boot
from a CD to install the Mac OS or run diagnostics.
Other limitations of the beige G3 are due to its age. The video and
16.67 MBps IDE bus that seemed fast in 1997 are very dated today, and
the requirement that OS X be installed on a partition no larger
than 8 GB on an IDE hard drive (and that it be the first
partition) are idiosyncracies that buyers should be aware of, but they
are not enough to warn people away from an otherwise attractive machine
that has dropped to a very affordable price (sometimes under US$200 in
early 2003).
An as long as one is aware of the limitations of the Rev. 1
motherboard and Rev. A ROM, this beige G3 isn't a bad buy either - but
you should know about the limitations of the older ROMs so you know
exactly what you're buying.
