Hello. Was wondering what price range you're considering for a G3 or
G4? I have a few sitting around that I'm looking to get rid of.
- Alan
On Apr 15, 2005, at 10:08 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
... Well, January, really. I asked about upgrade options for a Beige
G3 in a thread entitled "Should I stay or should I go?" (Musical
readers will note a theme here.)
Gene Osburn & Michael Thibault both recommended overclocking it as a
cheaper option to spending money on it.
Well, I've gotten very frustrated with its performance of late, what
with setting up an iMac DV for a client and finding that 350MHz
machine to be /considerably/ faster in OS X than my 300MHz one. I've
been scouring eBay for cheap G3 or G4 accelerators but there's nothing
I can afford coming up there in recent months.
So tonight, being unexpectedly in and bored on a Friday night, I went
for it and took the
screwdriver and tweezers to my own Mac.
I've gone primarily for front-side bus speed rather than absolute
clock speed, upping the bus from 66MHz to its maximum 83MHz (25%)
more, at a lower multiplier (4x instead of 4.5x), which keeps the PCI
bus at a standard 33MHz. This seems to run perfectly happily. I tried
a 3.5x multiplier but the machine wouldn't even "bong" at 375MHz - not
that I really expected it to. 366MHz might have been doable but that
means a standard FSB and I reckon that matters a lot. (Some observers
online have conducted experiments with careful measurements and
disagree, but this suits me - I'm being cautious.)
While I was at it, I've used PowerLogix' free CPU Director tool to up
my backside cache speed, too, from 167MHz (it was 150MHz before the
overclock) to 222Mhz - a ratio of 3:2 instead of 2:1. Seems perfectly
solid so far.
And all in all the machine is quite dramatically snappier. It's not
/transformed/ but it boots faster, programs load faster, opening
submenus from the Dock is faster... I'm surprised and gratified.
This may be quite a worthwhile move for an old Mac with bugger-all
resale
value. Recommended!
Details here:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G3_OC/tims.html
and here:
http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/%7Et-imai/maine.html
--
Liam P.
Posted from a rare beast: a Beige G3 333MHz, running OS X 10.3.8 :-)
GMail is now usable on this old girl!
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