On Aug 2, 2004, at 06:29 pm, Bruce Johnson wrote:
How about a Power Force G3/800 MHz ZIF, sold by OWC for $199.00?
Well, it's really depends on your situation. OSX has officially passed the beige G3's by, and their value on the market has plummeted. I'm not putting anything more into mine that isn't going to either return me a good price sold as a part or isn't movable to a newer system.
That CPU can be pulled and moved to a B&W G3, which is New World and likely to be supported for another year at least, probably more as it's New World and so is not heeled by Old world limitations. Might need a DVD drive next year for 10.4 but that's not hard to do.
That CPU is nice and fast, and it's pretty cheap. It would depend on what you wanted to spend and your eventual upgrade options. Bear in mind, if you sell it in a year you're not going to get a whole lot for it.
G3s are a bad investment for OS X IMHO, and are not likely to be worth much in the near future, rumours are bubbling under that Apple may cease support for G3s in the next 2 years (only hearsay).
OS X is completely Altivec optimised from the floor up, therefore there is little excuse to buy a G3 apart from the price. Even then you only get what you pay for. While a G3/800 is reasonably fast a G4 of the same speed running OS X will floor it pretty convincingly. Before anyone asks, it would be much the same speed in OS 9.2. My G4/500 B&W is a very efficient workstation still after all these years and various upgrades (Radeon 7000, 1GB RAM, U160 SCSI etc....). It runs my 19" CRT at 1600x1200 and still hurls huge window shaped QE effects around smoothly (that might be the Radeon tho!!) as well as almost matching my G4/800 iMac for usability (if not raw CPU power).
Rick mentioned the DA system that jumped in price on e-bay...this is why I call the Sawtooth the sweet spot. The machines themselves are relatively cheap, no more than $500, and they can take the top of the line CPU upgrades right now (which would be dual 1.25 GHz) They take a lot of memory with four slots, and the bus speed at 100 Mhz isn't top of the line, but it's not shabby, either.
The B&W has all that but no AGP (and a 1GB RAM ceiling but that's not really that limiting!!). Rumours of a Radeon 9200 PCI Mace Edn. would get around the AGP issue partially though - also don't forget many modern AGP Mac cards require AGP 4x or faster (because of a line supply voltage change on the slot I think?? It's certainly that way on PCs). A DA system with a 466 or 533MHz G4 onboard would be the idea entry level for me had I not got my G4/500 B&W and my iMac G4/800.
Just my 2p, YMMV
-- Mark Benson
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