[ValVashon]

This project has been a long time in the making, so please bear with me regarding this old machine. I was given one and recently another B&W G3 from work- it was grab them now or they will go to the chipper. They have a 300 Mhz processor so they are an early model of the Yosemite family. I'm just trying to upgrade one of them to a light use/web browser/word processor machine.

I also have a PowerLogix PowerForce ZIF card for this machine that runs at 1 Ghz. I installed it but think I did the upgrades in the wrong order. Also, what does xPostFacto have to do with this upgrade? I discovered I need it but I'm not sure when to install it.

I have the PowerLogix CD with the firmware upgrades along with 10.4 on a CD and can download xPostFacto.

Should I do a hard drive wipe and install 10.4 and do the upgrades with the stock processor, and then upgrade to the PowerLogix card? That would make the most sense to me and it's what I think I did last time but I ended up bricking the hard drive and would only get the OSX splash screen with the circle/slash no matter what I did.

I'll set that hard drive to slave and put it in another machine to see what is on in and if Disk Utility can save any of it otherwise I will wipe it clean and start over.

Meanwhile any advice or links to "how to upgrade" would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks-

Val

[Coldwater]

This site ( Accelerate Your Mac! News Page) was always good for information on cpu upgrades, if you haven't already looked here. Since they are using a 800Ghz in this upgrade your jumper settings will be different. Not sure the site will answer all your questions, but might help.
Review of Powerlogix's G3 800MHz ZIF CPU Upgrade

Some Xpostfactor info:Interview with Ryan Rempel, Author of Xpostfacto

OWC used to sell that upgrade so you might get addition information from them.

[ValVashon]

Thanks-

Those are exactly the kinds of links I was looking for. I was late to the game on these cards as I didn't have a PowerMac at the time.

If anybody else wants to weigh in with some of their actual experiences that would be helpful as well.

How's your bridge? I was just on Fox Island earlier in the week. If you saw a big satellite truck at the boat launch the other morning I was the one operating it.

Val

[Waragainstsleep]

XPostfacto is to allow you to install an unsupported version of OS X on it. I guess that would be Leopard in this case as I think Tiger would run on those anyway. Just about.

[ValVashon]

So I wonder why I installed XpostFacto and why I thought I needed it. I'm guessing that's what was giving me the circle/slash error message. 10.4 should be good enough for basic use on a B&W G3 as long as I keep it to 10.4.9 and under, according to the PowerLogix website. Apparently something about their card or software doesn't like 10.4.11.

Thanks for all the help so far. I will post results on this upgrade thing.

Val

[shifuimam]

Also feel free to join Maclassic. We like people like you.

[Mike Wuerthele]

As an addition to this thread, with the original machine being 300Mhz, you'll have some issues with master/slave IDE support. If you can find a PCI ATA card (or SATA card that works with 10.4!) then you're set.

Otherwise, one drive per ATA cable is the way to go.

[Waragainstsleep]

Originally Posted by EstaNightshift 

As an addition to this thread, with the original machine being 300Mhz, you'll have some issues with master/slave IDE support. If you can find a PCI ATA card (or SATA card that works with 10.4!) then you're set.

Otherwise, one drive per ATA cable is the way to go.

Man, that brings back memories.

[ValVashon]

Sure helps when you follow directions. And thanks to the responders here for pointing out my errors around using xpost facto when I didn't need to.

So here is what I have- a B&W G3 running 10.4.9, maxed out memory and a 60 gb hard drive. Yes. it's a revision 1 machine but I don't think more than one hard drive will ever go in it.

Did the installs and upgrades and made sure I had a stable system. Had a series of discs (CD's) with 10.4 on it; it was tricky to upgrade to 10.4.9 but the lowendmac.com site for 10.4 was very helpful. Apple has pulled some of the upgrades but you can work your way up with delta and combo upgrades to 10.4.9. If anybody needs to go to 10.4.9 from 10.4.0 contact me and I will send you a disc with the upgrades that still exist.

Installed the ZIF card and ran CPU director 2.3b6. Ran processor speed up to 1Ghz:



Cache setting also goes to 1Ghz- is this correct? I don't have a great understanding of what a cache is.



Here's where you set the clock speed:



Speculative access and Dynamic Power Management should be on with this processor:



Mostly my question centers around cache speed- it seems to follow the CPU speed, and I'm assuming that's OK? Or should it be disabled?

Thanks-

Val

[P]

Cache actually means a few different things in different situations, but in this case it is the so-called on-die L2 cache. Cache speed should be kept as high as possible while remaining stable, but I think in your case the cache speed is locked to the CPU core speed. If you start having crashes, you can try dropping the clock speed. Under no circumstances should you ever disable cache.