Power Macintosh G3 266 Minitower Mini-Project
The Rev A "Beige" G3
About Site Map Recent Activities PM 8500 Project Beige G3 Project My Apples
Original Project Date: The weekend of
7/27/04.
As of 1/2026 the G3 is disassembled and
waiting for her time for new attention.
Of my several hobby
projects this started as a simple case swap, tune up, and
general ‘what the hell is this things problem’, but I
thought this might be time to offer some details of what I
have learned about the venerable "Beige" Power Macintosh G3.
This is the state of the Beige G3 after upgrades.
Quick Tech Specs
| Installed OS | Apple OS X Panther Client 10.3.5 |
| Motherboard Type | Gossamer Beige G3 266 with Rev A Rom |
| CPU | G4 400 Sonnet ZIF Upgrade |
| Cache | Standard L1, 1 MB L2 at 1/3 speed |
| Main Board Speed | 66Mhz |
| RAM | 384 (128x3) PC 100 DIMMS (on 66 Mhz bus) |
|
Ports |
RS432 Serial x2, ADB, SCSI 2, Audio In/Out |
| Onboard Video | Rage Pro |
| PCI Cards | Radeon 7000 Mac Edition PCI – Video in use |
| SIIG USB 2/FW/10/100 Enet PCI Combo Card | |
| SIIG ATA 133 Card | |
| Drives | Lite-On ATAPI 48x24x48x16 CDRW/DVD |
| Seagate ATA133 160 GB Hard Drive | |
| Quantum SCSI 2 GB Hard Drive (old) | |
| Keyboard | Kensington Mac Slim Keyboard (USB) |
| Power Supply | Generic ATX multi-board 450W PC Supply |
| Mouse | Basic MS Optical Mouse (USB) |
| Monitor | Compaq Presario 15in LCD 1024x768* |
| Case | Aluminum ATX Tower - Standard |
*This is an odd used monitor I came to possess
that uses some funny and very hard to find (short lived)
variant of DVI that required a DAMNED EXPENSIVE adapter. Go Figure.
This computer was originally purchased as a
learner for my then wife. Unfortunately do to the synergistic
vagaries of the Beige G3 and unsupported OS X installs (along
with her general toughness on hardware) I inherited it as an
office computer. In other words, it’s a pain in the ass. First thing, considering I view the Beige
G3 case to be hostile, large and heavy, and really sharp, I
transferred the components to a more manageable case for
permanent use.
Luckily the Beige G3 is rather ATX
standard. Except for some now routine
back-of-case mods for the non-standard (from a PC standpoint)
port array a standard ATX power supply plugs straight in to
the motherboard (a virtue which continued until the
Quicksilver G4 gave it up for the “advantages” of the 28 volt
ADC connector) and no extra modifications to allow soft power
are required.
Total case transfer time took about 2 hours
(actual work) including motherboard mounting (drilling the
mounting holes), and case modification (cutting out the first
3 PCI slots to make room for the ports).
I wised up this time and selected a nice all Aluminum
case that was easy to cut. I put
the Western Digital 120 GB ATA drive back that was supposed to
go with this system back in, and an LG CDRW pulled from a
gateway as the CDRW mechanism.
At the start the internal drive (the 120 GB
already being used with the machine) was trapped in a funky OS
9 install hiding beside a partially working OS X Panther
install. After some effort showed
unrecoverable drive directory damage I decided a clean format
and install was the ticket. I
have acquired some scattered, mostly sneaked, experience with
this transitional PAIN IN THE ASS along machine along with its
hostility towards OS X (although I never had leave to figure
the tricks to make it run well). Similar
to a number of other Macs of its day this Mac cannot boot
into OS X from any IDE partition not in the first 8 GB of
the physical drive, along with the obligatory install
block. Most importantly, this
thing just hates booting in general. Considering
my spankings at attempting to use
cleverly divided user or other root disk folders
(such as Applications) that try to spread out their
structure over multiple drives works I decided other tricks
hopefully less of a nuisance were in order. The solution most
interesting (also a pain) is to use XPostFacto’s
helper disk functionality to boot from the large partition
while using the small one as the helper. The hard part (not too hard, just
time consuming) is getting the install on the large partition
in the first place. This time I
cheated and just placed the drive in a Sawtooth
AGP G4 on loan to my parents, rebooted into OS 9 and
reformatted the target drive with two partitions, a 7 GB and a
110 GB (formatting in OS 9 is required for booting legacy X
installs), then rebooted back into 10.3.4 to use the install
CD’s (running from the installers hidden in the System file)
to perform a standard 10.3 install on the large partition. I also did a simple drag and
drop OS 9 install on the small partition along with grabbing
XPF 3a17 and b2, CPU Director 1.5f2, and Sonnet PCI Tuneup
1.2.7 and 1.2.8 beta. After all
this was finished the target drive was placed back in the
Beige to be booted in OS 9 off the smaller partition for
hopeful OS X enabling and tuneup. All
that remained was using XPF to install its missing legacy
drives and custom bootx file plus the helper-drive
trick to get it booting from that otherwise unbootable large
partition.
The Beige was a typical
pain to get to boot as planned. It was easy to start
from the OS 9 CD (after five tries when I correctly held
down the right keys at the right time) but flat refused to
start from the newly installed drive’s new OS X install
(using XPF). It just could not find the drive as if OF
(open firmware – sort of like bios to PCers) had lied before
restart or was sleeping now (this appears to be an XPF issue
now fixed). After much futzing and changing from XPF
b2 back to a17 I managed to get it booting from the 110 GB
partition using the 7 GB one as a helper drive. Not
straightforward this involving using a CD boot to boot in OS
9 on the small partition then using XPF and jumping to the
large partition in OS X. The system then worked pretty
well remaining stable even while suffering lots of tuning,
hardware additions, and numerous restarts. Total time
to get it running stable in 10.3, including install, about 2
hours, although during the install I was otherwise
occupied. It as then updated to 10.3.4, received PCI
Extreme patch to activate Quartz Extreme, and underwent some
memory rearranging (along with others) to give it three 128
meg DIMMs for a total of RAM of 384 MB. This is skimpy
RAM and the minimum required for 10.3 stability in my
experience. Total figuring out Beige G3 tricks and
settling finally on a stable config, around 3 more hours,
although most of my time was just playing, surfing, and the
like until some issue presented itself (several days) so it
is hard to tell.
I had a SIIG PCI Combo USB 2/FW/Ethernet 10/100 card (no Mac
support) that always seem to work well in the Biege. This
card has the dreaded Realtek 8139 Ethernet chipset but this
does not seem to cause the Beige problems (the Realtek 8139
Ethernet chipset has problems in older Macs). It
also had a genuine ATI Radeon 7000 Mac Edition PCI card for
video. Its location in the office really needs
wireless, and after finding the OFFICIAL wireless cards for
Macs were $100 I opted on a $39 Motorola 802.11G PCI card
from Wal-Mart that failed to mention Mac support but as it
was Broadcom based appeared OEM Apple Airport to the beige
in OS X.
Some run time then confirmed its tendency
to corrupt IDE drives attached to the internal bus. This appeared be mostly OS 9 related
as most damaged occurred while booted into OS 9, or early in
booting OS X before OS X’s drivers are in control. This was controlled by minimizing OS
9 time along and restarts but it was soon clear that
sufficient drive corruption to make it unbootable was
inevitable with aggressive routine drive repair delaying but
not preventing this end point.
Looking for better solutions I installed a
2 GB SCSI drive and connected an 80 GB FireWire drive that
contained a working and often used 10.3.4 install. I removed the IDE drive hoping that
FW booting using the SCSI drive as helper would avoid any IDE
related corruption. This worked
well and ran significantly better than when booted from the
IDE drive. The FW drive was
faster and less CPU requiring. Surprisingly
all measured performance benchmarks improved, although only
slightly. Drive corruption also
disappeared.
Configured like this the
machine was a pretty good and pleasant performer and was
stable prompting me to leave the FW drive as the boot drive
for now. I also pulled the Lite-On CDRW/DVD drive from
the 8500 to replace the LG CDRW. I figure the 8500
could share since it also had a CDRW/DVDr and I
thought reading data DVD’s essential for my office system as
I have gone to DVD for most backups.
The final
result is a stable machine that runs and feels smooth and
responsive running OS X Panther with overall adequate and
predictable operation. This
included good function of FireWire and USB 2 including USB 2
drives, 10-100 Ethernet and wireless networking, and CD
burning.
When I owned this
computer I authored a rather extensive Read Me file with instructions
and tips for trouble shooting and booting. This is
probably generally useful for anyone trying to use one of
the Rev A "Beige" G3s and I have preserved it. Note that you
can make MOST of the pain from booting or using an ATA drive go away by using an
aftermarket ATA 100 or 133 PCI card.
Update:
This machine has been a star, at least for the first month
and is outperforming the 8500 in many ways. It remains
super stable as well.
Bigger Update:
Finally adding an ATA 133 card worked magic.
Update ~ 8-9/2004
After slow corruption from just occasionally having to boot back to the normal IDE buse I finally broke down and bought an ATA 133 PCI card (by SIIG).
DAMN!!!
All of a sudden that Beige boat anchor became
something else. No drive corruption. No 8 GB install
limit. No 127 GB hard drive size limit. Drive
throughput that jumped from 10Mb/sec to 50Mb/sec. All ATA
drives look SCSI to the System ALL THE TIME. Basically my
Beige went from being worthless to damn fast and reliable.
This one upgrade did more than the bigger hard drive, new video card, and hot CPU upgrade combined.
My now firm recommendation. Just fork over the $99 and get a new ATA card and save yourself months of hassle and years of life lost to stress.
I have exchanged experiences with another Beige
owner and his solution has been a new SCSI card with fast SCSI
drives. I agree that this is a better technical solution but
one likely to be significantly more expensive since high
volume SCSI drives are much more expensive that high volume
ATA drives.
Things I have learned about Rev A Beige G3s (not sure what applies to the B and C)
- They are a pain in the ass.
- No really. Avoid them, especially the Rev A ones.
- If you have to buy one then quickly, while the sales person is distracted, switch the Rev A ROM for the chip in the B or C next to it.
- OS 9 corrupts any connected ATA drive on boot. OS X is better but some corruption during boot is still a problem. You have only a short time of booting and running in OS 9 before the drive is unbootable. Therefore NEVER BOOT INTO 9. Stay in X at all times. If you do happen to end up in 9 go straight back to X and repair all the drives. Even better, remove and destroy any IDE drives (except for the CD drive) and boot from SCSI or (using a helper) FireWire.
- They will take 256 MB DIMMS, but only the ones with 16 128Mbit chips, not the ones with 8 256 Mbit chips. No store sells the ones with 128 Mbit chips. Forget 512 MB DIMMS (made with chips bigger than 128 Mbit). The memory controller can’t see the component chips if they are over 128 Mbit.
- The Rage 7000 Mac Edition does not like the ATI Extensions (ok, just one particular extension) in OS 9 when running on the Beige G3 (conflict with the onboard ATI Rage II?). This may be addressed via an ATI Firmware upgrade that ATI is hiding. (This is a low priority project) The result is when booting from an OS 9 drive that extensions (such as a boot CD when it cannot be removed) you must boot with the Shift key held down, or the space key and disabling all (or if your are willing to go through one crash OS 9 startup and just read) the one problem ATI Extension.
- Jaguar 10.2 is a supported install. It is just marginally easier than using XpostFacto to install 10.3.
- OS 9 does not have the 8 GB install limit. OS X does. It is helpful to know that the first 8 GBytes of HD space is at the TOP of the OS 9 partition panel and that by 8 they really mean 7.5.
- OS X only has the limit on drives connected to the built in IDE bus. It does not apply to 3rd party IDE cards at all. However the OS X installer missed the memo and does not know this such that the irritating install restriction still applies to disks attached to ATA cards. However (and many a one of us were fooled by this) you can happily copy an OS X install from another system, either to the entire drive, or the large partition, and run from it just fine.
- Standard ATX Power supplies work perfectly. The soft power-on has been changed to ATX standard and works.
- The drives seem to work better when limited to one drive per controller. One suspects data errors are compounded with two drives per controller.
- Using a helper disk to use a large partition or drive (over 8 GB) works well, including having the helper as the first partition on the large drive. Getting it to actually start the first time can be tricky, and random.
- The Sonnet Cache kext seems to reliably cause a kernel panic using either 1.2.7 or 1.2.8. The Sonnet tech support person I speak with occasionally is using 1.2.7 with 10.3 but I cannot replicated his success using either his techniques, or what works on the PM 8500. (A new Sonnet kext is out that works well.)
- CPU Director from Power Logix works well to activate the cache.
- The machine feels nice and snappy in 10.3 (10.3.4).
- No obvious issues with the RealTek 8139 Ethernet controller.
- USB 2 and FW seem to work well, probably better than on the 8500.
- This is not a machine for someone newly learning, with underdeveloped problem solving skills, or who likes to tinker with hardware or the OS but is a newbie, fool, impatient, or doesn’t like to think. It is way too finicky and requires some experience and thought to figure out and keep running.
Helpful Startup Key Combination (Remember,
you MUST have an ADB keyboard for these to work)
Startup keys (modify startup
parameters)
command-v - start in
verbose mode (OS X only - write standard Unix logs files
normally written to the console to the display)
command-s - start in
Unix single user mode (OS X only - worthless unless you know
what to do, reboot gets you out)
c - start from
CD
option - start from
alternate boot device
shift-option-command-delete - start from
a different alternate device
command-option-p-r - clear all
non volatile RAM settings (hold until mac beeps twice - long
pause between beeps)
shift - turn all
extensions off (9 or OS X)
Oddities as yet unexplained (but probably just needs some tuning, updates, ect…)
The Benchmarking is odd since the Beige is easily clobbered by the PM 8500. That makes sense for some things, such as processor speed, given the bigger faster caches and CPU, but not for others.
The PM 8500 memory speed is almost even with the Beige on benchmarks. However memory interleaving on the PM 8500 should only address its memories tendency to run even slower than its 50 MHz bus. The Beige with its 66 Mhz bus and PC66 memory should easily outrun the PM 8500 for memory bandwidth. Also the PM 8500 easily beats the Beige in most graphics test including Quartz and Open GL by large margins. Only the interface test is equal. They are running the same (basically) graphics card and even with some CPU differences the cards should not be so different.
Basically the PM 8500 (as upgraded) trounces the Beige G3 (as upgraded) and I don’t think it should. The faster bus and faster memory of the Beige should count for more. It is not surprising that the ATA 66 bus is not that fast compared to the newer card in the PM 8500 and we just have to give it a pass on that.
* With tuning most of this is resolved. Memory speeds on the Beige are now 40-50% faster than the 8500 and most graphics and interface tests (except OpenGL which must be CPU intensive) are slightly faster on the Beige. CPU and HD tests are, not surprisingly, still much slower. In use the Beige still has less range than the 8500 running out of breadth early but the interface seems crisper under light conditions. Some of this is simply RAM differences but one suspects that the demands of running from an ATA drive are also at work.
Just thoughts.
Counter Display Suspended by Page
Created early 8/2004
Updated 6/10/2005 - ATA
133 card update, Nvu update, general fixes.
Updated 6/16/2005
Updated 12/26/2006 - Updated to
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Updated 3/12/2007 -
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Updated 12/7/2025 - Minor
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