G3 B&W Upgrade Path or Mini Mac?

J

Jazz1

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I bought a G3 B&W with Apple Studio CRT, keyboard and mouse for $75.00. I've added an ATI 9200 Mac Edition graphics card.

I've also stripped the RAM and 40 gig HD from my old Beige G3 and put them into the B&W (having trouble with the slave HD though). The extra RAM helped but, QT movies stutter on this thing.

I thought the new video card would help, but it did not stop the stutter in the QT movies. Is the QT stutter and stall the 350mhz G3 CPU? Should I go for a G4 CPU upgrade, or just bag it and get a mini Mac to use with the Apple Studio CRT?
 
i have a BW G3/450 and it does not stutter at all when playing movies, but i have not tried to play HUGE movies either. for the $500 smackers it would cost to get the mini, you could hook up that BW real nice. it is definately a trade off though, the mini is just cool, period. the BW gives more options for expandibility. how much ram do you currently have in it, both have a max of 1 gig. You can get 1100mhz and i think 1400mhz upgrades for the BW, but i don't think i would go quite that high for two reasons. first, they are expensive, and have a deminishing return. what i mean by that is if you get the G4/500 upgrade for i think $150 it would be a large jump up in speed, and the higher the upgrade goes the smaller the margin of speed increase gets, but the cost increase rate stays the same. give some more specs on your BW and we could probibly give a better idea of which would be more economical. you already have a card that i think is pretty much the same as the mac mini.
 
The other thing to consider here is the system bus. The Mac mini's bus is much faster than that of the G3 even with the upgrade options. So even if you were to add a G4 processor upgrade, you would still not have the performance that a Mac mini would give you.
 
Thanks for the responses! The B&W has 416mb of RAM. System Profiler says uknown on type and speed.This is old RAM I think. Is it possible the RAM is different types that is making QT stutter, or is it more likely the old 6 gig 5,400 rpm drive?

The CPU is 350mhz. The new ATI 9200 video card 128mg RAM.

I'm trying to figure out how to get a 40 gig Maxtor into it to replace the stock 6 GIG drive.

The idea of a G4 500mhz is appealing at the price. If I dothe CPU if got this into it:

$75.00 B&W, Studio Display CRT, Keyboard & Mouse
$126.00 ATI 9200 Video Card
$0 Maxtor 40 GIG from my old Beige G3 (If I can get it to work)
$150.00 500 Mhz CPU Upgrade

$351.00 as opposed to $499.00 for the Mini, and I'd still need a display unless I just used the Apple Studio Display I picked up with B&W. The mini would need more RAM I'm sure.

I still can't get over the mini only having 32mb of Video memory. I wonder how that is going to play with Tiger?
 
The 40gb HD should fit in with no problem.
Just shut down the computer and disconnect the 6gb and replace with the 40gb. Of course this does NOT move over the data from the 6gb drive.
For that you can hook them up in master/slave (much easier if you have a rev. 2 logic board).
 
Be sure to use the jumpers the right way.

My 400 MHz B&W plays movies just fine (overclocked 300 MHz machine).
 
with what you already have I would personally just stay with the BW G3, but i may be biased because i have one too. 416mb of ram should be enough to run OS X and a quicktime movie ok. is the video big? I know that i had a few imacs (233 adn 333 models) that had the built in video cards with 6mb of vram and they had a problem playing good quality large quicktime movies really smooth, such as the high res star wars:episode II trailers. I would be willing to give you the results of playing them on my BW/450 with the stock 16mb video card if you want. I am actually still booting off of the original 6gig drive too.
 
Jeffo said:
with what you already have I would personally just stay with the BW G3, but i may be biased because i have one too. 416mb of ram should be enough to run OS X and a quicktime movie ok. is the video big? I know that i had a few imacs (233 adn 333 models) that had the built in video cards with 6mb of vram and they had a problem playing good quality large quicktime movies really smooth, such as the high res star wars:episode II trailers. I would be willing to give you the results of playing them on my BW/450 with the stock 16mb video card if you want. I am actually still booting off of the original 6gig drive too.
Click to expand...

I thought I read somewhere that there was actually a daughter card for the G3 B&W OEM Video card that was supposed to give hardware assist to DVD movie playing. Jeffo, is is that what you have?

I'm wondering what resources QT actually draws upon and on what priority? CPU speed, system bus speed, system RAM, graphics card, HD? Just wondering? To be more specific I was playing a large QT teaser movie from iTunes site, but when I chose a smaller movie I got similar results. It was the Fantastic Four trailer, and I got similar results with the Batman trailer and other movies of various sizes.

I guess I'm using this a a rule of thumb performance comparison against my other macs which do have not QT playing problems. 1.25 Dual Mirror Drive, 500 Dual, and a 1.25 Powerbook.
 
One downside to the Mini is that the HD is quite slow - 4200 RPM with the Mini, vs. whatever you have in the G3 (mine has a 10,000, a 7,200 and a 5,400, just to make it interesting).

Big QT movies are not very good for me, but DVDs are just fine - the DVD drive firmware does a lot of the work. Mine, incidentally, is a 300 MHz, and I can't say I got it for 75 bucks - I bought it new six years ago...
 
Max the ram out, and do it in similar increments. It does make a difference for some reason. My machine works 10X better with three similar sized chips (3 x 256MB) verses random sized chips (2 x 256MB + 1 x 128MB). A faster hard drive (7200RPM) will also help out.

I've run all kinds of movies on my beige box (G3 300MHz, 768MB RAM, 120GB-7200rpm HD, 2MB VRAM), never experienced and issue with a QT movie of any size/quality. WMVs, of course, are an entirely different story.


If you do decide to upgrade the processor, then you might want to look at a G3 (800MHz, 900MHz, 1GHz) before you buy the G4/500MHz upgrade. For most uses, the G3 800 is faster than the G4 500. You can still find those around for $150 to $200 new. A 1GHz G3 or 700MHz G4 both run around $250. The fastest I've seen to date for a B&W is a G4 1GHZ for $400 or the G3 1.1GHZ for $349.

http://eshop.macsales.com/MyOWC/Upg...I=#TimeFormat(Now(),+&shoupgrds=Show+Upgrades
 
My understanding is that if you've got two identical RAM sticks, the hardware is able to do something similar to RAID striping with the RAM. Then, fetching large amounts of stuff from RAM divides the work between two RAM sticks, rather than giving it all to one.
 
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