After playing with a friend's G3 350, was impressed, so am looking for a G3 myself. After looking on Ebay, and talking to a different friend, she said that she has a G3 300 spare - it has a rev 1 motherboard, 6GB drive, probably 96 meg RAM, and she offered £50 for it - I can obtain 256MB for nowt (old PC's), get 256 for £18 off Ebay, have a spare Promise PCI IDE controller and a 13GB drive, so can avoid this IDE corruption problem while having 2 drives. Is this G3 worth buying keeping in mind of the rev 1 motherboard? Is the value any good?
So you're "across the pond"...? Not up to speed on currency exchange rates, but her asking price sounds a bit high to me. I wouldn't pay more than US $60-75 (total including shipping) for a Rev 1 configged as you describe. For comparison, I just won this B&W 350 w/128 MB RAM and OEM UltraSCSI card installed for $89 total cost: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=5790063571 - (I don't really care that it has no hard drive because I'll be installing a 10,000 RPM Cheetah. The boot issues described in the listing probably scared off other bidders, which is why I got a reasonable deal on it. The blank folder on screen at startup indicates it's not a hardware problem.)
The B&W uses PC100; look here to see if the RAM you have seems to match the relevant specs: http://dealram.com/prices/systems/3/256MB.html The IDE controller may not be Mac compatible. Mac cards require special firmware, and most cards for PCs don't have it. You may want to check out the Swaplist and/or ebay for compatible controller cards.
B&Ws are a personal favorite, and I've owned Rev 1 and Rev 2 units. They're great Macs for the bargain hunter. But if you anticipate that you'll spend more than ~$200 US total on it (including any RAM and drive upgrades) you may want to consider shopping for a used AGP G4 tower. Just a thought....
Also what CPU am I able to upgrade the G3 to? 450MHz? a G4 CPU? If so, what speed?
A 450-500 MHz G3 ZIF would be a nice upgrade; don't spend more than $100 total for one, though. G4 ZIFs work fine in B&Ws once the motherboard firmware has been patched (free download) - I just scored a new Daystar G4/550 for $147.50 total cost ($179 retail price).
Again, what graphics card would I be able to use in this mac?
Most common upgrades are the 32 MB DDR Radeon 7000, or the 128 MB DDR Radeon 9200. Make sure you shop for the Macintosh PCI (not AGP) cards. The stock Rage 128 card has 16 MB VRAM and is more than enough for most "average" home users.
Finally, what version OSX would I be able to use on this - imagine I have a DVD drive in there.
The B&W fully supports *ALL* versions of OS X - CPU and total RAM are biggest determinants on how well it will operate.
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