768MB of SDRAM PC-66/100/133, 168-pin
3 PCI Cards including an ATA/133 or SCSI-160, Rage128 or Radeon graphics card, 10/100T or 10/100/1000T Ethernet, USB 1.1 or USB 2.0, FireWire 400 or FireWire 800
800MHz G3 or a G4 processor (I am not sure the top clock offered for upgrades for each of these, check owcomputing.com)
Onboard video can take up to 6MB of SGRAM
CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, DVD-RW drives are all supported in various configurations
Zip, Zip 250, Zip 750 IDE drives are supported
up to 137GB IDE/ATA/DMA hard drives (unless connected to an ATA controller card, then it supports larger drives)
there is no limit on SCSI hard drive sizes
Some things to keep in mind:
The Beige G3 is a great Mac, very upgradable, good design. I have owned several and still own one personally and one in our office.
That said, the system bus is only 66MHz.
The PCI bus does not support as much throughput as the blue and white G3s or early G4s.
Adding a FireWire PCI card will not allow it to boot from FireWire.
Revision 1 motherboards with revision 1 ROM cards do not support slave drives on either IDE bus 0 or IDE bus 1. You can connect them but you may very likely have drive corruption issues, this is well documented. Rev. 1 blue and white G3s had the same issue.
Putting several hard drives in a Beige G3 Desktop case is a huge pain, it can be done but its not really pretty, I currently run a CDRW and three IDE hard drives in my DT G3, it works, but due to the cabling issue you generally end up pulling the floppy drive and putting a hard drive there, some people may not care for that.
Beige G3s have EIDE not ATA. The two standards are compatible but EIDE transfers at only 17Mps while ATA transfers at 33/66/100/133 depending on its version.
Due to having only PCI slots Beige G3s as well as Blue and Whites and Yikes! G4s will never support Quartz Extreme, there is a hack to enable it on these Macs, people's milage seems to vary with it.
Using Mac OS 8.x or Mac OS 9.x this is a very strong Mac. It supports Mac OS X up to v.10.2.6 [and probably 10.2.7 when it is released]. It will not support 10.3 come its release. With a 400MHz G3 or better, a Rage128 graphics card or better, at least 256MB [more like 384MB+ of RAM], and a large enough hard drive it will run Mac OS X v.10.2.6 very acceptably for many people including myself. RPM of the hard drive does seem to have a significant impact on performance in my experience.
It is my understanding that DVD decoding is iffy on these systems under Mac OS X, I honestly know nothing about it, but if its an interest of yours, you should look into it first a bit.
I hope I helped.
David
On Saturday, September 6, 2003, at 10:52 AM, Mike Kauspedas wrote:
I want to get a beige G3 and was wondering how much upgrading can be done to
these. ie: where does the HD max out at? How much CPU can I put in (how far
up does it go in MHz?)? Will it take a G4? Is it a ZIF socket? How much RAM?
What kind of RAM does it take? Thanks for any help.
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