I need to learn about B&W Power Mac G3

[alfred_bowman]

I now have an old B&W Power Mac G3. I'm preparing it for a Mac graphics artist whose iBook G3 has an inoperable screen. He tells me that he can hear the hard drive spinning.

I am an old Windows PC user (16 years) who knows little about the practical aspects of the Mac. (BTW, I intend to buy a new Mac for myself once I have seen what is announced at MacWorld San Francisco in January. I simply cannot stand Windows any longer.)

Right now I have a few basic questions about this Power Mac.

1. It has two display adapters. The short bus slot has an ATI Rage 128 GL-based card (ATY-Rage128y.) A normal PCI slot holds an ATI 3D Rage Pro AGP 2X-based card with a TI video chip on it (ATY,NexusGA.) I wonder which card is faster. Can any one help me with this?

2. One PC 100 memory slot is open. Would this Mac be able to use a generic (e.g. PC) DIMM?

3. There is an additional PCI card that has me stumped. It has an Adaptec chip on it. The outside of the card has a female connector with 15 holes. There is a male connector at the top of the card. It is 2.75" wide and holds 50 pins. Can someone tell me what this card does?

4. It seems that my friend's iBook may be operable. If it is, could the Power Mac access the iBook's hard drive (and optical drive) over a Firewire cable?

5. The print on the Power Mac'sIDE controller chip is too small for me to read, even with my magnifying glass. Since there is no sign of a second hard drive connector, I have to assume that this Power Mac has a Rev. 1 system board. I have read that Rev. 1 boards may have problems with their IDE controllers. I think I should leave its 12 GB hard drive in place since it is working. However, does anyone know of
larger hard drives that work with this system board?

Currently, the Mac is running OS 9.1. My friend can load Panther.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

1) No, that machine does NOT have an AGP slot, so the card in question is NOT an AGP 2x card. The B&W G3's logic board has four PCI slots: one 66MHz slot (usually used for the graphics card), and 3 33MHz PCI slots. I would recommend replacing both those cards with a single ATi 9200 128MB Mac Edition PCI card in the 66MHz slot.

2) There is no such thing as "Mac" vs. "PC" memory. Memory is memory. The B&W G3 takes standard PC-100 unbuffered non-ECC DIMMs.

3) More than likely that's a SCSI or Ultra-SCSI card.

4) Yes -- connect a FireWire cable between the two machines. Turn on the iBook and immediately hold down the 'T' key for some length of time (until the hard drive stops churning, or perhaps a little longer). This should put the iBook into "FireWire Target Disk Mode," and the B&W G3 should be able to access the iBook as though it were a regular, external FireWire hard drive.

5) There are two limitations with the Rev. 1 logic boards: they have problems using more than one hard drive on a single bus (so no master/slave combos), and that hard drive must be 128GB or smaller. You can circumvent these limitations by installing a PCI ATA adaptor card, which will let you use up to 4 ATA hard drives of any size.

[Natobasso]

Not sure if this is yours or not:
http://lowendmac.com/ppc/g4saw.shtml

This is a great source of mac computer archival information.

[Qion]

...he definitely said in the first line, "I now have an old B&W Power Mac G3".

[ElDiabloConCaca]

This is the page you're looking for:

http://lowendmac.com/ppc/g3c.shtml

[Natobasso]

Originally Posted by Qion

...he definitely said in the first line, "I now have an old B&W Power Mac G3".

I confused B&W for 'black and white' rather than blue and white.