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WelshDog · Dec 18, 2002, 07:33 PM

Here goes,

Have a powerful itch to dive into OSX, but there's not much water in the bottom of by Beige G3/300 minitower. I fear I would bump my little head. So my options include:

1) Replace with new PowerMac dual 1 gig. Cha- ching $2400 please thank you. Plus new Wacom tablet (old one is ADB), plus SCSI card, plus plus plus. Can't use an iMac, need slots for an audio card.

2) Add $300 (approx) accelerator card to beige bomber. Would be limited to 500 mhz, so running OSX would still be somewhat slow. Also not forgetting that there's no way that running OSX on a beige with add-on cpu card is going to work flawlessly. Not sure I can do that to my wife, she already is frustrated by frequent crashes/restarts etc. with OS9 as it is.

3) Suck it up and wait until Macs with the new IBM chips come out, buy one of those and be really happy for a few months.

Okley dokely doodley, who wants to share? Which of these scenarios sound best?

Maybe I should just chunk it all and use my Color Classic (with Sonnet Presto Plus).

derekn · Dec 18, 2002, 08:51 PM

OS X will run okay on your Beige with some limitations. If you really want a processor upgrade, go for the OWC 533Mhz one. I ran a 500Mhz one in mine and it actually ran flawelessly. There's no need to enable the cache with any 3rd party software, that is only necessary with a G4.

Unfortunately, Jag will be a shot in the dark. I installed it on my Beige, got constant lockups. Took out my Radeon card, ran it that way, same thing. At the same time though, there were people running Jag on the exact same setup as on my Beige. 10.1.5 ran as flawlessly as I could ask for though.

If you really need a new Mac, go with the dual 867, I did and haven't looked back. You'll retain OS 9 booting and get a good speedy system.

Macola · Dec 22, 2002, 10:40 PM

Let us know what you decide and how it works out--I'm in a similar position with a beige G3/300 tower.

OreoCookie · Dec 23, 2002, 06:03 AM

Originally posted by WelshDog:
Here goes,

Have a powerful itch to dive into OSX, but there's not much water in the bottom of by Beige G3/300 minitower. I fear I would bump my little head. So my options include:

1) Replace with new PowerMac dual 1 gig. Cha- ching $2400 please thank you. Plus new Wacom tablet (old one is ADB), plus SCSI card, plus plus plus. Can't use an iMac, need slots for an audio card.

2) Add $300 (approx) accelerator card to beige bomber. Would be limited to 500 mhz, so running OSX would still be somewhat slow. Also not forgetting that there's no way that running OSX on a beige with add-on cpu card is going to work flawlessly. Not sure I can do that to my wife, she already is frustrated by frequent crashes/restarts etc. with OS9 as it is.

3) Suck it up and wait until Macs with the new IBM chips come out, buy one of those and be really happy for a few months.

Okley dokely doodley, who wants to share? Which of these scenarios sound best?

Maybe I should just chunk it all and use my Color Classic (with Sonnet Presto Plus).

Get a dual gig or wait till half of next year and buy a tasty new PowerMac then.

Don't upgrade your Beige, it's not worth it.

D'Espice · Dec 23, 2002, 10:35 AM

Originally posted by OreoCookie:

Get a dual gig or wait till half of next year and buy a tasty new PowerMac then.

Don't upgrade your Beige, it's not worth it.

I second that, don't do it it's not worth it. The difference in performance between the Dual 1Gig and a upgraded G3/300 Beige is like night and day. Plus, a 500 MHz G3 CPU won't really make that much of a difference since it's only 200 MHz more than your old microprocessor.

I would suggest either getting a new Dual 867 PowerMac (The difference between the Dual 1 Gig and Dual 867 is minimal, it's better to get more RAM instead of the faster CPUs) or wait around a year 'till the IBM PPC970 based PowerMacs will be available, b/c you shouldn't expect them earlier than by the end of 2003.

-Q- · Dec 24, 2002, 01:07 PM

At this point in time, I'd say it's not worth it to upgrade the beige. I upgraded mine last year (when we hadn't even broken 1 GHz in the PowerMac line so I saw no reason to spend all that money for a box that wasn't THAT much faster) and it has been running flawlessy, even with an upgrade card. I'd say wait until you can afford a new box and experience OS X that way. It really does need all the RAM and processor you can throw at it.

My upgrade has really only bought myself a year, year and a half at most, so I'd say wait...

Mr. Blur · Dec 26, 2002, 12:10 AM

i agree with of the others here....at this point upgrading "ol' beige" is probably not worth it. if you have the $$ then buy a new powermac. and unless you get some amazing bundle deal with all the peripherals you want/need, then just get those replaced when you find you really *need* one of them (so many people ran out out and bought usb floppy drives for their imac as they couldn't imagine a computer without a floppy...now they gather dust on the shelf)

if you do decide to squeeze a little more life out of the beige, i second the recommendation on the other world chips....i put one in my old beige (before i got the dual800) and never had a problem installing or in operation....i even ran ran x public beta and 10.0.x and while not "snappy" it was certainly acceptable for what i expected.

Cipher13 · Dec 26, 2002, 02:43 AM

Don't upgrade the beige. Let her run OS9 or Linux or something.

Get yourself a new PowerMac, but wait until January.

j mars · Jan 7, 2003, 10:10 AM

I have a Beige DT with a 583 G4 (83mh bus), 768 MB ram, and a Radeon 7000. I have no problem running Jaguar 10.2.3 at a fairly zippy speed although OS 9 is a bit faster. However your SCSI and serial ports will not be recognized so you will need a USB/Firewire PCI port. Remember that your OSX must be on the first HD (<8GB) on the ATA bus. By the way I am using two monitors one off the motherboard and the other off the Radeon using Quartz Extreme. My son is running an AIO with a 400mh G4 (67mh bus), 640 ram, and a Radeon with an external monitor. For some reason this reason this machine has been a bit more of a bother than the DT to get running Jaguar, I really don't know if it is my 10yr old son, a mixture of ram (now fixed), or the rev C ROM vs the rev B rom in the desktop. In any case it has been back on line for over a week after the ram swap.
We do have problems trying to boot to OS9 on a different partition or HD on both machines. It will not boot directly from X to these 9's - it reverts back to X. It will boot to a 9 on the same partition as the X and then from this 9 will boot to a 9 on another partition/disk.

FauxCaster · Jan 7, 2003, 10:30 AM

... Plus, a 500 MHz G3 CPU won't really make that much of a difference since it's only 200 MHz more than your old microprocessor.

'Only 200 MHz more'...I got to say this cracks me up because it takes me back. I can remember several years ago when the designer who used to sit across from me just HAD to get the zif upgrade for his beige 266 Mhz -- to the fastest c.350Mhz -- when it first came out. He paid out the woz-oo. That was a 30% increase in MHz, back then (and still is!)