This week we'll be looking at the value of four generations of Power
Macs: the beige G3, blue & white G3,
"Yikes" (PCI) G4, and early AGP G4s. Today we begin with the oldest of the
four, the beige G3 models introduced in November 1997.
Seven years ago, when I began Low End Mac, the company I worked for
had just retired and sold some old computers - a Mac II, LC, and LC II. These vintage 16 MHz workhorses
had been in use for up to a decade. They also made great first
computers for my kids.
Working in IT, at the time I was supporting Macs from a 1989 16 MHz
IIcx to the Power Mac 8500s used
in the graphics department. With such a vast array of hardware to
support and few good resources on older Macs on the Internet, Low End
Mac was born.
1997 was also the year the beige Power Mac G3 was
introduced, the oldest Mac officially supported under Mac OS X.
Today Apple sells dual
1.42 GHz Power Mac G4s with AGP 4x video, Quartz Extreme, Mac
OS X 10.2, a DVD-burning SuperDrive, three IDE buses, and lots of
drive bays.
Just how practical is the beige G3 in 2003, either as a classic Mac
OS workhorse or an OS X platform?
The Pros
I was stunned to see used beige G3s selling for US$200 recently when
working on our weekly Power Mac G3 Price Tracker.
Both Mac of All
Trades and MacResQ
have recently been selling 266 MHz beige G3 desktop systems with
128-256 MB of RAM, a 4 GB hard drive, and a 24x CD-ROM drive for
that price. There may be other equally low priced sources as well.
The price is definitely one reason to look at a beige G3 as an
entry-level OS X machine or a nice step up from any pre-PCI
Macintosh.
The beige G3 comes in three configurations. It was the last Power
Mac to use the clever slide-off case 
designed
for the Power Mac 7500 -
and the minitower version used the same convenient case as the Power Mac 8600 (definitely a
precursor of the brilliant drawbridge design of the blue & white G3). A third
alternative was the Power
Mac G3 All-in-One, Apple's last all-in-one design prior to the
iMac. What a behemoth!
The beige G3 was the last Power Mac to include a floppy, and it was
often ordered from the factory with a Zip 100 drive installed. It was
also the last to include SCSI support on the motherboard; SCSI became
optional using an add-in card on future Power Macs. This was also the
last desktop Mac to use Apple's serial port, and it still has the ADB
port for older mice, keyboards, sketch tablets, and other ADB
peripherals.
Although far from the first desktop Mac to use an IDE hard drive
(that honor goes to the Quadra/Performa/LC 630 of 1994), the
beige G3 was the first top-end Mac to use an IDE hard drive instead of
SCSI. That means that you can easily plug in inexpensive, fast, high
capacity drives today.
The CD-ROM drive is a standard sized IDE device, making it quick and
easy to swap it out for a CD-RW drive, DVD-ROM, etc. Accelerate Your Mac! maintains
a huge database of reader reports on which drives are compatible.
Compared with earlier Power Macs, the beige G3 had a faster bus (66
MHz vs. 50) and better video.
The ZIF socket made it easy to replace the CPU, and the J16 jumper block made it easy to experiment
with overclocking. (Most G3 users find the computer readily supports 33
MHz more speed than rated, and sometimes you can get away with a 66 MHz
boost.) Today you can plug in fast G3s and G4s to easily speed up
performance.
The beige G3 supports every Mac OS from 8.0 (we recommend the free
8.1 update) through today's 10.2.4 and has three PCI slots, providing
enough expansion options for most users.
The Cons
Although the G3/266 generally outperformed the 350 MHz 604e in
Apple's top-end Power Mac
9600, there were some places where the newer computer fell behind
the older one. The first of these was the IDE bus.
I'm not going to debate the merits and demerits of SCSI (generally
faster, requires less CPU overhead, allows 7 devices per bus, costs a
lot more), since they tend to be less significant with modern drives
and on a desktop computer. Now that IDE includes DMA (direct memory
access), most users won't find a good IDE drive the least bit
sluggish.
In fact, our profile of the beige G3 notes: "For the first time,
Apple shipped a Power Mac with a top notch EIDE hard drive that held
its own against SCSI-2 drives. It was a bit of a paradigm shift, but
one the Mac OS community eventually embraced."
But the Rev. A ROMs of the earliest beige G3s doesn't support slave
drives, a problem that can be solved with a ROM transplant. With the
Rev. A ROM, the beige G3 only supports 2 IDE devices; with Rev. B and
later, it supports 2 masters and 2 slaves.
Also, although 16.6 MB/sec. was a fast IDE bus back in 1997, most of
today's IDE hard drives - even the cheap ones - offer 2-4x that much
performance, making the beige G3's IDE bus a real bottleneck for drive
performance and use of virtual memory. I consider the slow IDE bus one
of the beige G3's greatest drawbacks, but it can be overcome by putting
a relatively inexpensive Ultra66 or Ultra100 PCI card in one of the
expansion slots.
The beige G3 has one more significant drive-related drawback tied to
Mac OS X: If the drive is larger than 8 GB, it must be
partitioned, the first partition must be no larger than 8 GB, and
OS X can only boot from that partition. This can be overcome by
using a SCSI hard drive, and some IDE cards (such as the
Acard Ahard) trick the Mac into seeing the attached IDE
drive as a SCSI device, eliminating the need to partition.
Video performance is nice under the classic Mac OS, it's just
adequate under Mac OS X. You can address this by adding a
third-party PCI video card (the Radeon Mac Edition is a favorite).
Although it will never match Quartz Extreme on the AGP Power Macs, you
can have decent video performance under Mac OS X.
Although CPU upgrades are generally quick and simple, be sure to
check under the hood before buying a faster CPU. Some beige G3s have
voltage regulator module made by Royal Technology that "doesn't seem to
adapt to the new processor properly" (see Macworld
for more details). The Royal VRM could provide too much power and
damage your new CPU. If your beige G3 has a Royal VRM, it should be
replaced before you upgrade the CPU.
A Best Buy?
The question: Should we rate the beige G3 as a Low End Mac Best Buy? We've done it once before
on a model that had some significant limitations but got so cheap that
it became a good value (see our Best Buy report on the Power Mac 7200).
With prices as low as $200, it's very tempting to apply the best buy
label - but we're not going to do it. The beige G3 is a very good buy.
Although it's relatively inexpensive to add a faster PCI controller and
a larger, faster hard drive, that money more than makes up the
difference between the cost of a used beige G3 and a used blue & white G3, which
we'll be looking at tomorrow.
When you factor in the b&w's faster system bus (100 MHz vs. 66),
faster IDE (33 MB/sec. vs. 16.6), improved video, and the presence of
USB and FireWire, the newer model is the better value.
The beige G3 remains an excellent low-cost computer, especially for
use with the classic Mac OS. It would be an excellent step up from a
Quadra, x100 Power Mac, or Performa, especially since it's still
compatible with ADB peripherals, serial printers, and SCSI devices.
If it's all your budget allows, it's a very good buy. The b&w G3
is better if you can afford it, but as long as you know the beige G3's
limitations and are content to live with them, you can definitely find
happiness with a beige G3. 
