Someone probably has already suggested this, but you could always re-seat the ram tallest to shortest. A nice ramp of Ram! :D Really liked this video set, even though I'm a PC person myself.
I've been upgrading a few old Power Macs. The fan noise went to almost zero on all of them after replacing the 120mm system fan and the PSU fan with Noctua ones:
That was a super fascinating series, thank you so much for making it! I used to have a Power Mac G3 BW, all the way until 2007 when I got an Intel Macbook. I remember overclocking it, and adding as much RAM as I could find for it. I had the same Pioneer optical drive as you did, btw! I read it was the same as used in the Power Mac G5, and that it was compatible with mine, so I got one. Made burning CDs so much faster! I didn't have much money for hardware upgrades, but that Power Mac was probably my most loved computer ever. Nowadays I use a Framework laptop with Linux, and after seeing your series, I had to try Geekbench 2 on it. My little i5-1240p ran the benchmark in 32 bit, and scored 27000 points. I also have an eGPU (RTX 4070), and I wish I could do the same graphics tests as you did. It's crazy to see the advancements of computing.
A couple of hours well spent of my life. A belated ATA BOY. A testament to Apple’s software and hardware developers and the hard work of the Users (teachers, students, business professionals, and to the-one-and-only IMNC.
what you could do with the ram, is re-arrange them based of height, so that their going from shortest in front to tallest in back or something, and that would make them a bit more presentable.
Wonderful job watching you put this G3 together. I love tinkering with old hardware to upgrade to faster and better. Thank you for your time sharing this project.
I’ve enjoyed watching this series of vids, the highs and lows of PPC meddling lol. On the raid front, I’ve tried similar, without the SSD just ide and, the one thing that I remember is that sometimes on a restart, the machine tries to start from the wrong drive. It sounds odd if your trying to start from raid 0, but I remember having to start, holding the Apple key to get boot drive selection, making sure I selected the opposite drive to the one that’s auto selected. That’s one thing I tried to get raid 0 working as boot. Hope this helps if you try again with SSD Raid. Thanks for interesting vids.
The upgrades have a massive difference, one thing i have done on an old single core atom x86 board is add the fan by slightly bending the fins on the heatsink the ones out of sight just enough so there is less of a gap between them so i can use screws to hold the fan on it worked well and fan was very secure .
Awesome series. I just got my hands on a BnW G3 and want to have some fun with it. I've never seen an interior on one like this, though. It seems to have a much larger case fan and a single HDD plate that holds 3 drives side-by-side, held in by a single screw on the far-right edge, with no way to install a HDD stack caddie like yours.
What a MAD project! Bit of a shame you couldn't get the RAID0 SSD setup working but those benchmarks are just out of this world regardless. Good to see it all together and looking seriously smart after years of you banging on about upgrading the thing ;)
I used to find Star Wars: Jedi Knight II - Jedi Outcast, Jedi Academy, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Aliens vs Predator all ran really well on my 600Mhz G3 iMac with a Rage 128. So they should fly on this beast.
Awesome video, Tom. I just love these kind of series. They are really entertaining and fun to watch. Can't wait for the future project on your other macs.
I wonder is you had Archiver package and all of it's it's plugins would the problem with DMG files go away as there must be a version for the MAC OS, I wonder why you didn't try an ATI/AMD AIO Wonder card although it doesn't have DVI or HDMI might give you the resolution you are looking for.
I'm sorry for the long comment but if anybody can help me, it's you guys who are reading these comments! I bought a powermac G5 but I'm having an issue where when I turn it on, it works wonderfully for about 10 seconds to 1 minute, but then whatever's on the screen just freezes and the fans slowly get louder and louder :( It arrived with no HD, but I bought a mercury 3G SSD. I stuck it in this morning and booted to the CD drive (a leopard install disk from another mac). It worked perfectly this first time I booted it, and I even formatted the SSD in disk utilities on the install CD. I didn't go through with the install though because it said Mac OS wasn't compatible with the machine but that's because it's just the disk from another mac. I powered it off and went to work. When I got home I made a USB stick with bootable leopard and booted the g5 into open firmware. This is the first time it locked up and the fans went full blast. I unplugged the USB stick and tried open firmware again, but still full blast. I removed the SSD I stuck in earlier and tried again, but nope, still locked up & full blast. I then tried booting from targeted disk with my powerbook but the g5 froze on the boot menu thing that shows up when you hold alt/option (but that same boot menu worked without freezing earlier in the morning!). I googled the problem and reset the SMU. The first time I booted it after that, it booted to the leopard CD no problem! But then I tried again booting into the boot options menu with alt/option and it froze. I tried two more times to boot from the CD and it also froze each time. The weird thing is, it chimes every time I boot it, no matter if it's going to freeze or if it's going to work. Also, when it freezes booting to the leopard CD, sometimes it freezes on just a grey screen before the CD drive revs up, sometimes it freezes after the CD drive starts going, and the apple logo shows up. I don't know a whole lot about Powermacs, and I knew buying this from ebay was a long shot since it's quite old, but honestly I am DEVASTATED right now! I bought an SSD, a quadro, and 8GB of ram for this (I haven't installed any of that btw) but I'm not sure if my machine even works now or not :(
Hi Tom another great video. I have a question. I put up my early 2008 8-Core Mac Pro on Craiglists asking $900 and I had a offered for $500 (w/original box and everything). Is that a good price to let it go? Thank you. Specs: 2 x 2.8GHz Quad-Corre Intel Xeon 12GB DDR2 Memory 120GB SSD ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024MB 8x USB 2.0 Firewire 400/800 Bluetooth 3.0 Airport Wifi 802.1a/b/g
i got the exact same computer, i own a repair store and a guy sold it to me for 10 dlls (yes 10 dlls) it had only a faulty hard drive, i offer him to repair it but he didn't want it.
i hope its ok to ask a question. i have just got a powerbook g4. i am about to try installing 10.5 leopord as i found a RU-vid showing it. Can i manage to upgrade it to a 10.7 like lion or anything? i have a few mac games that need 10.7?
I should update my Dual G5 to see how far I can go with it. Parts are cheap. I have previously run an SSD in it, which is really quick, but I should do more to it.
Hi IMNC,love the series, I have a mac mini pro,Mac G4 and G5,none ow which seem to behave themselfs (which is why I'm watching your vids for hints) cheeky question for you,the G5 boots when only the cd is attached ,but not the HDD. Any idea if this is the motherboard or the PSU?,plug in both,you get a click and nothing happens,no power up,same again when adding a HDD to the PATA CD cable.Cheers!
The Firmtek SeriTek line are PCI-X SATA cards that are backwards compatible with the 33mhz 64bit slots in your G3. That should give your double the performance of your current card. Also, it supports 4 drives instead of only 2.
Awesome video Tom, kind sad to see that the upgrades have all ended now :( Can't wait to see what you do with this machine if you get the software. Did the bluetooth adaptor work that you installed ?
Fivos Sakellis The water effect when you drop a widget onto the screen in dashboard, that's about it I think! It doesn't matter half as much in Tiger as it does in Leopard which is handy for older machines like this.
So if it was possible to run Leopard on this machine, you wouldn't have the transparent menu bar and such? At least you got smooth UI effects such as the genie minimize effect.
put that CPU upgrade in the iMac! (jk, unless you can :P) awesome video and awesome series! keep up the good work, I cant wait to see the PPCPromise! also what is the name of the song at the end?
531 is a decent score - is that in Geekbench 2? its very close to Power Mac G4 (Quicksilver) 867Mhz (gb score: 541) and just under my result for my Tualatin 1.3ghz Celeron (gb score:577) probably closer to a Quicksilver 933mhz model from 2002
I think my highly grumpy iMac G5 needs some software and hardware upgrades similar to these. Anyone got solutions for iMacs crashing and not responding until I have to force shut it down??? It's getting jolly irritating now... thanks
TOM, back in the day when most computers only had small heat sinks like this, the ones that had fans just sat on top like yours and there were just fatter screws that screwed down and "self-tapped" into the area between the fins of the heat sink. Not sure if this would work in your case or not. Also, check macintoshgarden (org) for iLife 05. They have all PPC versions I believe, but 05 for sure.
Hi Tom, If you were interested then i do actually have all of that Apple software that you mentioned near the end of the video if you wanted to get contact with providing you with the disc images then we can do that somehow if you wanted.
i got you beat bro, i have a 1.1 ghz G3 upgrade card in mine. Gigabit ethernet, Radeon 9200, Blu Ray Burner just for funzies, and the Sata Card with two ocz ssds in a raid 0
Get - XLR8 Mach Speed Control - it is a much better CPU controller software than PowerLogix....I have used it for over 10 years with my B+W G3/750gx.......and works with many more upgrades.
Worlds Fastest G5? I own Apple PowerMac G5 Quad G5 2.5GHz with Apple nVidia Quadro 4500 and Apple AirPort Extreme on RunWay (combo 802.11g and BlueTooth), all original Apple made and or branded
Nice work! But there is still a better graphix option for your machine. If you find a GeForce 6200 PCI matching this www.amazon.com/PNY-GeForce-256MB-Graphics-VCG62256PPB/dp/B000VA5GJY PCB Layout (which means with BGA, NOT TSOP!, ram chips), it can be flashed with a mac rom. And this even gives you full CoreImage support with a G4-upgrade.
Mine was faster than yours via Sonnet g4 1.2ghz with 2mb l3, and pci nvidia 6200 256mb. Halo in 720p with everything maxxed out. Still pretty outdated tho, but fun to build
