I question whether there is value in upgrading my 6100/66 PPC with a 240/266 G3 card? Does anyone have any experiecne with these? For example, is the Bus speed sufficiently fast to achieve a true clock speed of 266 MhZ? How about software compabtility?

[wlonh]

see http://www.lowendmac.com/ppc/6100.shtml

and http://www.lowendmac.com/macdan/md006.shtml

[ydnar1]

Chuck D, I would suggest you go for it. I upgraded a 7100/66 with a G3/266 card from Sonnet and have a personal friend who upgraded a 6100 the same way. It's very easy...usually just plug in the card in the PDS slot on the motherboard, install the little extension that comes with it and restart. Voila' you have a much faster machine. No issues with the latest OS'es or software that I've seen in nearly two years of using one, however, you need to keep the extension that operates the card updated. Hope this helps!

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Chuck,

I've upgraded quite a few 6100's for my fire department using the Sonnet G3 card(s) and according to the Metronome software (included), they are running at 264mhz.

Was it worth it? In my case yes. We don't have the luxury of replacing hardware very often so extending the life of older Macs is very attractive to us.

Our 6100's have been upgraded with G3 cards, anywhere from 40 to 72 megs of RAM, and some have had their hard drive capacity increased.

Bottom line... for the investment we've made, we now have 5 year old Macs doing much the same work as our first generation (RevB) iMacs. Talk about a return on investment! How many 5 year old PC's do you see operating in any business?

[JN]

My 6100/66AV has a Newertech G3 card in it and it's an incredible difference. It runs at 248mhz, but gets very hot. I had previously used an XLR8 overclocking chip that gave me about 80 mhz and it came with a small fan. I kept the fan in it with the Newertech upgrade to help with the heat, so far, so good. However, it still won't play the latest and greatest games (Quake, Unreal etc.) because there is nothing you can do to increase the Video Ram. Still it's fine for Photoshop, Pagemaker, Word and similar programs. I was also unable to upgrade to any OS later then 8.5.1 which is very stable. http://www.xlr8yourmac.com and http://www.macgurus.com are great sites for info on upgrading the 6100.

I upgraded my Performa 6115CD (6100/60) with a NewerTech 240/266MHz upgrade card. I must say that this card is an absolute dream! It's been flawless since day one, and due to the larger hard drive and additional RAM installed over the past few years, this computer competes with the iMacs out there. If you don't need it for playing the latest games, the accelerator is a great investment!

I think the newer 240/266 is great. It runs at 247mhz in a 6100/66. I have the version with 1meg backside cache, so it can do some things (such as mathematica calculations) as fast as a 266mhz G3. Not bad considering the bus speed in the 6100/66 is only 33mhz!!! The 1024k cache also gives video a boost. I'm running OS 8.6 and have no problems. The nice thing about the newer card is that it allows you to continue to use any pds video card you already have.

[gene]

I have upgraded a few 7100/66s and 7100/80s with G3/266 card from Crescendo. It is not as fast as a beige G3 but is feels more like a 604/150 or 604/180 machine.