The gfx card I will try to use 😀

Just tried some overclocking.

Credit to The House Of Moth for this guide.
https://thehouseofmoth.com/ppc-overclocking-station/

I was able to get the 300mhz to run at 350 mhz. Unsure how stable though until I get more software running.

I of course took the scsi jumper suggestion. Thankfully I had been saving them for a rainy day from broken drives.

To explain the diagram, because it confused me at first. The author colored the empty top four positions red and the empty remaining positions blue. And you see black jumpers placed over those positions. Which is why there are so many colors going on there. Pin one is marked on the board.

Where’s the mac enthusiasts at?

I ordered a 6 port usb card that advertised 1.1 speeds under pre osx operating systems. But in the meantime I came across a 5 port nec that seems to work alright. I wonder if mac has the same usb slow down problems that many retro pcs have with usb 2.0 cards

I am wondering if I can make this work by chance? Guessing probably not. 🙁

Never had a G3 tower. Got a G4 Cube and a G3 iMac though.

I’d probably look to grab one of those bizzare upgrade CPUs from the likes of Sonnet or similar. I’ve got a dual-CPU upgrade in my Cube, which makes it quite decent at the likes of Q3A when coupled with a Radeon rather than its original Rage Pro.

paradigital wrote on 2023-08-18, 06:31:

Never had a G3 tower. Got a G4 Cube and a G3 iMac though.

I’d probably look to grab one of those bizzare upgrade CPUs from the likes of Sonnet or similar. I’ve got a dual-CPU upgrade in my Cube, which makes it quite decent at the likes of Q3A when coupled with a Radeon rather than its original Rage Pro.

I have not been able to find one

I have the CPU that looks like it has 486 pins but no square in the center missing pins it’s just one giant pin array

FWIW if you can also get ahold of a Yikes!/PCI Graphics Power Mac G4 (the AGP graphics/Sawtooth PMG4s used a different CPU socket) CPU module, it can be used in the Blue&White/Yosemite PMG3 motherboard, although you may have to downgrade the firmware as Apple blocked that upgrade path past a certain firmware version.

Technically wise, the PCI Graphics PMG4s motherboards are the same as a Blue&White PMG3 Rev. B board but with some tiny modifications (like the firmware and the ADB port being removed), so you can directly swap the CPUs around.

On the later AGP Graphics PMG4 ("Sawtooth") the CPU socket is different and proprietary to that board.

(And for those who have a earlier beige PMG3 (aka "Gossamer"), the G4 ZIF module from a Yikes PMG4 should also work there too)

Speaking of the Radeon 9250, it gets a bit tricky, there's a few variants of that card (four of them), and only **one** will work.

So here they are:

• 64MB VRAM w/ 64-bit bus
• 128MB VRAM w/ 64-bit bus
• 128MB VRAM w/ 128-bit bus <- Only this version will work
• 256MB VRAM w/ 128-bit bus

Unfortunately yours appears to be (if I read the sticker right) a 256MB 128-bit card, so it apparently will not work.

EDIT: Here's a good guide on how to flash it, using ATIFlash under DOS: http://themacelite.wikidot.com/ati-flash

A few things about that system. 300mhz probably means it has the rev a logic board. Those had some issues with the ATA 33 controller on the main hard disk port. It will only support a master device, Slave devices won't work. There are some other minor issues with the ide controller including potential corruption but I have not personally experienced this. The secondary port with the CD and zip drives connected to it does not have those issues but is much slower. The 300mhz CPU cards also usually had 512kb of backside l2 cache, the 350 mhz and faster ones had 1mb of l2. The extra l2 cache does give a little bit of extra performance. The CPU cards are generally good for a 50mhz overclock but you might get lucky with a 100mhz overclock. 1gb is the max ram.

For upgrades you can flash a cheap SATA PCI card. There are some caviats and limitations on operating system support depending on which firmware you choose but it's faster and more reliable than the onboard ide. The PCI Radeon 7xxx and 9xxx are the best graphics card choice to reasonably run both os8, os9 and osx on the G3. Anything faster won't have os8/9 support. Mac scsi cards are cheap if you want to mess with SCSI. Ive never bothered with a USB 2 card so I don't know how they perform on the G3.

10.4 tiger is the latest operating system it can run. Its a bit sluggish but tolerable even with the original rage 128 graphics.

Years ago I played around with a 604EV and 300mhz cpu card, upgraded to a 350mhz one. Remember how the cpu speed was set by a bridge resistor. Was fun for a bit 😁
Then played with a G3 300Mhz but lost interest when the board died, still have the cpu (like a interposer, not a "card")

Here’s an interesting thought. Could I solder 2mb of cache onto one of these cpus?

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-08-26, 19:46:

Here’s an interesting thought. Could I solder 2mb of cache onto one of these cpus?

As far as I know the G3 750 and G4 7400/7410 were hardware limited to 1mb backside l2. If you had one with a 512kb l2 it should be possible to solder on a 1mb chip but 1mb appears to be the upper limit.

The G4 7450 and derivatives had full speed on die l2 but an optional off die 1 or 2mb l3 cache. Presumably you could upgrade the 1mb l3 cards to 2mb or find cache chips and all the supporting components and solder them to one of the boards that came without optional l3.

The g3 750cx, fx, gx and the G4 7447, 7448 only had full speed on die l2 cache. No ability to add an off die l3.

A more interesting upgrade would be trying to increase the speed of the backside l2 or l3. It's probably running at half processor speed or slower. If the cache speed isn't hard locked to 1/2 processor speed you might be able to solder in faster chips and get the cache running at closer to full speed.

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-08-02, 22:24:

Anyway, awesome enough it now has 1gb! Woohoo! Which unlocked a cool easter egg. Virtual memory disabled under os 8.5? And 9.22 it says that 996? I forget the exact number is the max memory supported along side virtual memory.

You may want to read about how the classic MacOS did memory management (i.e. very badly). Basically, each application gets allocated a fixed pool of memory when you start it up and that's it. Virtual memory lets you open more applications at the cost of performance... but because the memory management is so simple, it's not like Windows/Linux/etc where adding more RAM basically automagically improves performance, at least up to a certain point.

I was a Mac guy up until about 1995 (and then starting back in 2015), and back then at least, my impression was that almost no one used virtual memory even on the machines that supported it. If you didn't have enough RAM to run 3 apps at once, then you... only ran two... or went to the store to buy more RAM. And that's perhaps the other point - if you looked at the Mac world, the first OS with virtual memory was 7 in 1991, and it only supported virtual memory on machines with MMUs and I think 32-bit clean ROMs, which is... not a lot of machines... if you look at 1991's lineup. Very different from Windows that had virtual memory already in 3.0/3.1 and enabled by default in 95.

(Now, I believe the PPC machines did have some slightly fancier memory management where virtual memory had a small benefit overall.)

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-08-02, 22:24:

Next up are expansion cards.. this is where things are getting a little challenging.

The system has both 64-bit pci (33mhz) and one 66-mhz 32-bit pci slot.

It seems that a radeon 9250 on the 66 mhz slot may be the best card one can use in such a system? Is this correct? Or would it be a voodoo 5500? Or are newer gen cards supported? What about a parhelia?

You should ask on a Mac forum. Note that the video cards would need different firmware than PC variants of the same card...

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-08-02, 22:24:

What about a intel chipset sata raid controller or a promise raid controller? I am guessing these won’t work due to drivers and rom incompatibility? So what is the fastest storage solution? The DOM is nice, but I gotta think the chips aren’t the fastest on it, and it is probably only ata-33/66 so a add in card would be better.

What about sound? Would a audigy 2 zs be supported? Or??

Long story short, what are the maximum upgrades I can give this Mac?

Go to a Mac forum and ask there. There is a BIG PPC Mac community that has figured out all of these answers two decades ago. The beige G3 and the G4 are probably the two most upgraded Macs in history - people have put all kinds of things in there.

I do not believe that Creative Labs cards have ever supported Macs, for a very simple reason - Macs have had built-in sound since 1984 and that sound was always 'good enough' for normal use, then there are some professional sound cards for studio mixing-type work. But there simply has never been a market for sound in between those two.

There are definitely some SATA cards that will work and some SATA cards that can be flashed with the proper firmware for a PPC Mac.

Generally speaking, the more "Intel"-branded something is, the less likely it is to work. The more Windows/PC-specific the problem something solves, the less likely that card will work in a PPC Mac, etc.

Conversely, the more similar something is to something Apple uses themselves (e.g. an add-in card with the same network chip they use in newer machines), the more likely it is to work. Or if it implements a generic driver framework (like most USB device classes) that OS X implements.

Also, note that a lot of things will only work in OS X and specific versions of OS X. e.g. I just bought an 802.11n PC card that was recommended to me for a Titanium G4 on a Mac forum, and that card was recognized right out of the box in Leopard, but seems dead in Tiger.

Remember that Macs were a LOT more marginal in the late 1990s than they are today. There's a reason Mac people refer to that period as the "dark era". And the B&W G3 is the first Mac to abandon a lot of traditional Mac connectors (serial, ADB, SCSI, the Mac DB-15 video port, etc) for USB, VGA, and FireWire which is an additional thing to note.