[rescue] G3 Score

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 11:40:31AM -0500, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> We just scored a stack of ten beige Power Mac G3s, all of them labelled
> as being 32MB/4GB/24xCD, three 233MHz/512k, seven 266MHz/512k.  I'm not
> quite sure yet what we're going to do with ten beige G3s.  I figure
> we'll set up two of them for the kids, and possibly cluster the other
> eight at some later time.

They would make a good room  heater :-)

A friend of mine has one he still uses. Runs OS 9 quite nicely. OSX might,
but 10.2 is the last release that will run without Xpostfacto.

They won't boot anything bigger than 8,000meg (slightly less than
8 gig), but you can split your disks into paritions as long as the boot
partition is completetly within the first 8,000 meg.

The other problem is the IDE controller chip is the same or worse than the
the Blue and White G3 which has been discussed here before. To summarize,
slow CD-ROMs (24x seem to work, but not all) and hard drives 12 gig or
less are ok (there was one 20gig Maxtor that would work).

OS8/9 did not have that problem because Apple never shipped them with large
or fast drives, if you bought a larger drive it needed "third party formatting
software" which included a limitation of drive speed. OSX up to 10.2 included
a test for the chip and kept the drives in low speed mode.  OSX 10.3 won't
run on the machine, so Apple dropped the check although the B&W G3 has the same
chip and is supported. 

The SCSI controller on board does not have these limits and you can boot with
it.


> 
> Anyone have any suggestions on PCI ATA66/100/133 cards that will work in
> these?  LowEndMac says the onboard EIDE interface is pretty slow.
> 
> Also, anyone have any compatible RAM in 128MB or larger sticks lying
> around...?  I'd like to put at least 384MB in the ones we're going to
> actually run, and 512MB or more would be better, in order to run OSX on
> them.  They have three memory slots, up to 512MB per slot in low-profile
> DIMMs.

If they have the same memory controller chip as the later B&W G3, the
maximum chip size is 128meg. A 256 meg DIMM will have 2 sets of 128meg
chips.

They will run Linux pretty well, but the last YellowDog that runs out of
the box is 3.x.

Geoff.

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Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
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