[Rowen]

Well, I bought an iMac a few months ago after my monitor going out, and needing more power for gaming. But I have this Unique relic up for grabs now. Yes, I know, it is a Powermac G3. But, looks can be deceiving as this Powermac G3 has been heavily upgraded and a paint job that took me three days.

Specs:
Powermac G4 600mhz (OWC, the good upgrade that keeps it at 100mhz bus)
Rev. 2 Motherboard
448mb Ram (64 +128 + 256mb)
40GB Maxtor Hard Drive
16x Pioneer DVD/CD burner (It should be flashed for max burning speed)
Black Zip 100 (Took me a while to track down one with a black face plate)
Belkin USB 2.0 5-Port
Original Rage 128 with 16Mb
New 120mm fan inside
New cables going to the DVD/Zip drive

And not to mention... The custom paint job done to the case. I took apart the Powermac over the course of three days, painted it peice by peice to go together. 400 grain sand paper, primer, then a layer of semi-gloss paint. Love and Care.




The history of this mac is it came from a college out in the mid west in very nice condition. It was factory spec 450mhz without the zip drive. I got it some time last year and started using it with a Audiophile for music studio work using Digital Perfomer 4.5, and yes, it does hold it down very well.

Now, there isn't much to do to this mac before it reaches its highest limits and you can say you have the best of it's generation. New video card, more ram, replace the power supply with something higher, and maybe a new ATA controller for faster HD speeds.

Price: I know I can't do a feeler in this thread, so I am going to toss up the number $600. This is stating I haven't seen a modified mac go up for sale, hope it isn't too much.
Approximately what it took to build so far:
CPU - $200
B&W - $150
DVD Burner - $60
Hard Drive $50
Belkin Card - $30
Fans and Cables - $20
Paint Job - Priceless.
I will also send out the old 450mhz CPU that came with it originally.
I will also wipe the drive, and install Tiger and iLife '05, as well as do all the updates on it so you can have it all crescent fresh!

Thanks
Andrew "Rowen" Conner

PS. Feel free to comment and give suggestions.

[ericssonboi]

I have to say... that looks good.
Good luck with the sale

[jbmitt]

It didn't come from Miami University did it?? I know they auctioned a bunch of the older macs off.

[bowwowman]

kewl paint job yo...

Although I appreciate & support your artistic/creative endeavors, all the bling bling in the world won't change the fact that it's STILL a yosemite on the inside, and neither does a list showing what you paid for all the upgrades.

Upgrades definitely add to the overall value of a machine, but NEVER, EVER will you recoup 100% of their purchase price in the end. You listed the following:

A) Less than 1/2 GB of ram, not really enough for Tiger to run smoothly as it can
B) Slowass stock Rage128, we all know 16mb of vram doesn't cut it with Tiger
C) Small & slow (by todays standards anyway) Hard drive, running from the mobo ATA/66 controller. Also not all that great for tiger
D) A dvd drive you say needs to be flashed, meaning that it is a hacked PC-only unit that may or may not be 100% mac-compatible/bootable/iApp supported, even after flashing......
E) USB card, new fan & cables, all of which are a dime-a-dozen at any mom & pop pc shop. If you actually paid $50 for them, you got seriously ripped off......unless the cables are the fancy, lighted/rounded type with the heavy duty connectors, and the fan is a fluid bearing, dynamically variable-speed unit....

I hate to burst your bubble, but you dont really have anything extraordinary here, at least not from a technical or highly desirable point of view anyway

You can get a similarly spec'd sawtooth or digital audio on ebay for about the same price or less, with AGP video & higher ram capacity, among other things......

And BTW, ALL the zip drives that shipped in the B&W's had black faceplates on them.

IF I was in the market for a B&W, I would offer you ~$200/shipped for it as it is now. Perhaps $250 *IF* you included the Tiger & iLife Disks. Thats about what you would get for it on ebay too

[Lateralus]

Excellent pain job.

[NYK Ace]

wow that is a NICE paint job

if only i had some extra cash laying around...

[doucy2]

cool im intersted in it w/o the cpu upgrade or w/o any upgrade ofr that matter
mainly want the case

[Rowen]

Sorry for the late replies, I was out of town.
The DVD-Drive was flashed to preform maximum burn speed. Not to be Mac friendly.

To be quite honest, $600 is high, $300-400 would be the goal and $450 high. I listed what it took to build for simple pleasure if anyone wanted to do it to their B&W. I could probably get something out of it by parting it out, in fact that would probably be the reason someone would want it if they were into collecting macs.

It is still up for grabs, reasonable offers welcome.
I'll post it on ebay at the end of the week if no one is interested.