I've heard about these personality WINGS A/V cards. Do these work
with the B&Ws, or only in the beige G3s?
Brian
On Jun 3, 2005, at 9:05 PM, GDB-B&W-X.3.9 wrote:
On Jun 3, 2005, at 9:09 PM, Brian wrote:
I'm new to this list, so please bear with me.
I just bought a G3 400 mHz r2 B&W Powermac (which has not arrived
yet) and have several ideas of what I'd like to do with it
already, so I thought I'd run it by the knowledgeable folks here
since I don't have alot of specific B&W info.
The main thing I'd like to do with this machine is make it my
"expanded legacy machine." This means I would like it to run
every major Mac OS release on it from 8.5 to present. I plan to
do this either with multiple hard drives (as many internal as is
feasible) or with one large hard drive and many partitions.
however, before that happens I need to worry about one thing in
particular: the optical drive. So far as I know, the rev. 2
motherboard 400 mHz models cam standard with a CD ROM drive. This
means I will have to upgrade the optical drive, and am not sure
exactly what I will need to do so. Is it just as simple as a
drive and a decoder that comes with the drive, or will I have to
buy extra components?
What are the options I have for installing hard drives on this
machine? Will I need anything in particular to make modern,
larger hard drives work with it?
What video cards are excellent choices for upgrade in particular?
What kind of card does it use: PCI of AGP?
Which of the ZIF upgrades is worth my attention? Do any of them
have any bugs/issues?
As you can tell, I'm a bit excited, and am eagerly anticipating
this package. Here is everything I know about the machine thus far:
B&W Rev 2 tower
400 mhz
zip drive
64 MB RAM
10 GB HD
ATI Rage Pro (Stock video card)
Tested using OS 9.1
All standard ports, 2 USB, 2 FW, 1 ADB, 1 Ethernet, 1 Sound out, 1
Mic
Power cord
Any opinions are welcome, keep in mind I plan to upgrade this
machine extensively as a project/hobby. It will serve uses beyond
this, but I enjoy tinkering with things like this and squeezing
whatever i can out of them. Cost factor and cost effectiveness
will be considered, but are not a primary concern.
Brian
First off, welcome to the list Brian. The B&W is an excellent
machine to experiment with. I have, in the past, run most of the
Mac OS'es on mine, as well as a couple of versions of Linux. The
first thing you want to do is upgrade the RAM. It will take up to
4-256 Mb sticks. I recommend the OWC branded ones from OWC. They
are cheap and work well with the B&W. As for optical drive, you
didn't really specify which direction you want to go, but
mentioning a decoder I would assume a DVD-ROM drive at the least.
I have a Lite-On 48x combo drive in mine and works very nicely for
both viewing DVD's and burning CD's. It's also bootable on the
B&W. If you plan to view DVD's in anything less than OSX, you will
need a hardware decoder board. I got lucky with mine as it
originally came with a DVD-ROM drive and also had the Rage 128 Pro
with the decoder board. I have since upgraded the video to a
Radeon 7000 Mac edition (PCI) board with no decoder. I don't need
or want to view DVD's in OS9, so I put my Rage 128 in my old
beige. I believe that a 120 Gb drive is the largest supported with
the on-board IDE interface, but you can add a PCI ATA-133 card
which will support larger drives. There are many ZIF upgrades
available for the B&W, but do try to find one which takes advantage
of the B&W's faster bus speed. Some are limited for use in the
beige models and therefore use the slower bus speed. I have a
G4-450 Mhz (Overclocked to 500 Mhz) Fastmac upgrade ZIF in mine.
There are much faster ones available, but cost was a factor for
me. I use broadband/ethernet, so I don't know much about modem
options. I think this covers most of your questions, at least the
ones I could answer from my perspective, I'm sure others will reply
as well. HTH
Just a message from Doug...
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