Best ZIF upgrade for Beige G3

Hi Massimo !

If you've been reading about the G3 1GHz upgrades being preferred over the G4, you were most likely in the Blue and White forums.........

The B&W has a Motorola bridge chip (not to be confused with the faulty IDE chip...........lol) in it that conflicts with any G4 upgrade over 600Mhz........

A G4 chip over 600 MHz causes the processor bus speed to be reduced to 66MHz (the same bus speed as a Beige G3 !)..........

The G3 chips in the B&W don't have that problem........

In a Beige G3 you could probably go to a 800MHz G4, or better, without any problems.......

Kevin

Hello Massimo,

In the beige G3 army, I have an old 233mhz Desktop with the latest Rev D motherboard (820-1991-B) that runs a 500mhz Sonnet G3 CPU (I haven't tried it on G4, yet). It runs well, with no problems.

I have what came to me as a 333mhz Mini-tower, that now sports a 450 B&W CPU slightly overclocked to 466mhz....no problems.

My main Mac (ex-266 MT) uses an old Powerlogix adjustable that has seemed more stable at 500mhz than at the 533 I first tried. It crashes occasionally, but I think that more the fault of IE than the processor. As you can probably tell, I like to build these up out of old (and cheap) pieces I find on eBay (or other bargain basements); they tend to acquire personalities, sort of like old friends.

I haven't any real resommendations....they all seem to work pretty well.

I also have a G4 Gigabit Ethernet with a Sonnet Dual 500mhz CPU. It's definitely faster, even on OS 9.2.1, but somehow I don't like it as well - I don't know why.

Don't know if any of this is of any help, but the price is right.

Good luck....Jon

Hi Massimo

I have upgraded my beige G3 with a Sonnet Encore/ZIF 1Ghz G4 with 1MB 250Mhz L2 Cache from the WeLoveMacs website ( http://www.welovemacs.com/soen1gg4wi1m.html)

It doesn't look like the picture shown on the website, so I don't know if they have changed it. Mine has two processor cooler fans on the top and is a considerably larger card than the original processor.

The instructions that come with it are very specific and detailed and very easy to follow. The hardest part being to move the ribbon cables out of the way (it comes quite close to the ata sockets on the motherboard and add the power cable branch (included).

I am a relative novice, but didn't have any problems.

The only down side that I am aware of (I think this only applies to processors 700mhz and above) once you have osx up and running is the issue of booting from a cd if you want to do this, you need to move back to os9 and boot from there. Not sure why.

Once installed it is only minutes of a job to swap back and forth between processors should you want to (sometime useful if you want to troubleshoot and want to rule out the upgraded processor). As you can see below, I am now running 10.3.9 without problem thanks to XPostfacto.

(note: need to upgrade from built in graphics card to run osx software like iphoto4 and dvd player)

Regards
Duffledorf

I have used a Sonnet Encore ZIF 500 in my desktog beige G3 (original 233MHz) - worked great. Just upgraded to the 1GHz ZIF. Seems to work fine, haven't done speed tests yet. Sonnet support is excellent: they exchanged a broken cable witth amazing speed.

Hi Massimo

I use the mac for the usual things, itunes, iphoto, dvd player, etc. plus a few heavy weights like quark, Adobe CS and office for mac.

Have you decided on your upgrade yet?

regards
Duff

I am thinking of getting the sonnet G3 1000mhz zif upgrade for this beige G3 all-in-one. can i ask a few questions
1.what kind of video card do you have (i plan on geting the ati radion 9200 128mb vram pci video card)
2.is your memory maxed out(mine is 224mb soon to be maxed out)
3.is there a big diffrence of speed on booting and stuff
4. can it play halo if you got a good video card to play it
5.does it play games good

" 1.what kind of video card do you have (i plan on getting the ati radion 9200 128mb vram pci video card) "

Unfortunately, an All-in-One unit can't take advantage of a PCI video card, because the card's port is located externally and the display is connected internally. With some extensive hardware modifications, the display can be patched to the card's output. The procedure for doing so requires thorough experience with CRT and electronics repair. If you do a web search, you should be able to find some photos and a description of what's involved, posted by someone who altered his AIO G3 to use a PCI video card.

huh i plan on useing a second monitor well an external monitor