Power Macintosh G3 Tower
The Power Macintosh G3 Beige ( "Beige", code-named "Gossamer") is a personal computer company Apple and belongs to the Power Macintosh series.
The PowerMacintosh G3, introduced in November 1997, was the fastest Mac at the time of its release. It was equipped with the newly developed PPC -750 processor, which had been developed in cooperation between Motorola and IBM . The 750 was the first processor with level II cache, which significantly increased the speed of data transfer.
There were revisions A, B and C of the beige Power Mac G3, which differ in the system ROM and the graphics chip. Master / slave operation was only possible on the IDE interface from revision B (due to the newer ROM), i.e. H. four devices were supported instead of two previously. Revision A had an ATI Rage II graphics chip, from revision B a Rage Pro with 3D acceleration was installed. Revision B has a wrongly constructed personality card, which means that the image on the CRT monitor is dark and blurred.
The three revisions can be distinguished by the ending of the ROM version number. B. in the "Apple System Profiler" utility under the "System Profile" tab - Production Information:
- Revision A: 40F2
- Revision B: 45F1
- Revision C: 45F2
Since 1997/1998 Iomega ZIP drives were in great demand, the slot under the CD drive could be equipped with an internal ZIP100 drive. In revision A, the ZIP drive was connected via SCSI (ID 5), in the subsequent revisions via IDE bus (due to the fact that in revision A the two available IDE channels through the system hard disk and the CD -ROM drive were already occupied).
In 1999/2000 it was then possible for the first time to install the Voodoo graphics card "Voodoo3 2000" from 3dfx Interactive Inc. , which had previously only been designed for Windows computers, in the G3. These cards were legendary in the dissolution of the second half of the 1990s and specialized in games.
The IDE interfaces support the Multiword DMA transfer mode with 16 megabytes / s and a maximum hard disk size of 128 GiByte, corresponding to 137 GByte. The G3 as a so-called “Old World Mac” fulfills all requirements for the operation of Mac OS X 10.2 “Jaguar”, provided that at least 128 MB of RAM are available. The latest officially supported operating system version is 10.2.8. Mac OS 10.3 and Mac OS X Tiger can be installed using the shareware XPostFacto . Mac OS X Leopard can no longer be installed due to the missing G4 processor.
The housing is very accessible and the various slots allow a wide range of upgrading.
System profiles
Apple Power Macintosh G3 Tower ("Beige")
- Construction time: November 1997 - January 1999
- Main processor: PowerPC G3 (PPC 750)
- Mass storage: SCSI hard drive, 24-way CD-ROM drive, 3½ "drive for 1.44 MB floppy disks, possibly Iomega Zip drive (2 × SCSI)
- Level I cache: 32 kiB
- Level II cache: 1 MiB
- Bus rate: 66 MHz
- Clock rate: 233, 266, 300 and 333 MHz
- Max. Working memory: max. 768 MiB (3 × 168 pin DIMM memory banks)
- ROM size: 4 MiB
- Graphics chip: ATI Rage II, later Rage Pro, soldered to the motherboard
- Graphics memory: 2 MiB built-in, expandable to 6 MiB
- Graphics resolution: depending on memory expansion
- Sound: 16-bit stereo system
- Connections: Personality Card, 3 PCI, SCSI: DB-25, Serial Ports: 2, ADB: 1