Damn my obsession with items that are virtually useless to me!
So Im just hopping along the bunny trail surfing the web and looking at random junk when I find an old Blue & White G3 Powermac. So what? - right? Well, heres the catch. I find it for about 90 USD. Is this a good deal or am I just enthralled at the price that I can get something that reminds me of the days I used to play Unreal Tournament in my dads office? Is 90 dollars too much to pay for a bit of nostalgia? Is 90 dollars a good enough bargain to get me a new(old) Powermac G3?
Or, is this just totally another bout of my obsession with totally useless items? Lets think about my current situation shall we? I have, at the moment, three computers of which two are macs. One, 14 inch iBook G4 1.42 ghz, An eMac 1ghz model with 640 mb of ram and my pride and joy a homebuilt PC with an AMD Athlon 64 3200+, 6600LE PCI-e gfx card, 2.5 gb of RAM, a 40 gb and a 250 gb pata hard drive. So, do I really need this old piece of technology?
Well, lets think for a minute of what we could do with it. We could just boot up in OS9 and remember the good ol' days. Or, we could boot up in OS9 and play some Rogue Spear, just like in the good ol' days? Or we could just browse the web with the old Internet explorer, just like in the good ol' days. Wait? Whats so good about the good ol' days? Or better yet, whats so bad about "now" days? Hey, upon this thought, screw the good ol' days and lets just get a processor upgrade kit and bring her up to date! Maybe a video card upgrade while were at it? Wow, now we would have a Blue and White G3 Powermac with a 1ghz processor and a 128 mb graphics card for about 500 dollars! Hold on. Now that hardly sounds like the initial 90 dollars... Perhaps... What if I ebayed the eMac? I never liked that damn 32 mb video card in there anywho! What would that bring? Five, Sixhundred dollars? I could easily break even if I sold the eMac for the supped up G3!
Wait... I dont even use my eMac. I do need a new car... Huh, what... I could simply buy the Powermac and put my pc parts in it and submit it as a hardware mod on applefritter! How about it? A G3 Blue & White Powermac thats actually a PC. Isn't that kind of like a transvestite?
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Comments
If that's a transvetite, then
If that's a transvetite, then what are the Macintels? What do they call those animals that can change their sex at will according to need?
$90 is the average price for a B&W these days. I've seen a lot go for less.
Really? Hmm.. I dunno, I like
Really? Hmm.. I dunno, I like mac gaming alot, and one of the main reasons I might actually do this is to upgrade it to play some more recent games, such as Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, or Medal of Honor etc. What do you think the performance difference would be between a supped up B&W and a 1 ghz emac would be?
edit: Whats the cheapest you think I could get a 1ghz ZIF processor for? Anyone know?
It's kinda tough to keep sayi
It's kinda tough to keep saying, but for the price point, it's hard to beat a Mac mini. If you add the costs of moving the B&W to similar specs as a 1.5GHz Mini you'd be pretty close cost wise but you'd have a machine with absolutely no warranty, you'd have to pay for the OS ($129) and also any other apps that would come with the Mini. It gets to be like the build a PC vs buy a Mini debates that go around the web lately. You can build something up with no support and value-added features, or you can buy the cheap Mac mini and probably end up with a slightly faster system than you can make the B&W be without a mobo hack.
It really depends on your goals and pocketbook. If you have a nice USB kb&mouse and a nice monitor, you won't be out any extra to get the Mini anyway.
mini all the way
mini all the way
Also, if you happen to get a
Also, if you happen to get a "quietly upgraded" model, you'll get 64MB VRAM on the ATI Radeon 9200 instead of the orignal stock 32MB. That should help with the gaming a bit.
how do you buy one with the 6
how do you buy one with the 64mb Vram?
Make sure it's a 1.33 or 1.5G
Make sure it's a 1.33 or 1.5GHz. They won't be marked, but the Mac mini page on WikiPedia has some details. I added the HDD and PC3200 specs myself.
you know i thought there were
you know i thought there were new mini's out there but i cant find them on apples store page.
As the WikiPedia page says:
As the WikiPedia page says:
Yeah... I have thought about
Yeah... I have thought about a mac mini. But the thing is, I like the tower idea, and the fact that you can upgrade its gfx card to a whopping 256 mb. Personally I would rather pour a bit of effort and time into building something and upgrading it than just buying something stock. The os and applications are of no issue to me at all, for I have all of the resources in this realm I could think of
So, If the said 90 bucks isnt really cheap? Where can I get one for cheaper? Also, does anyone here or anyone here know of anyone or a place that would be able to supply ZIF processors for cheap? As this seems like it would be the most costly part of the upgrade...
edit: Also, I still dont know if I would be losing performance.. I mean since I could upgrade the gfx card in the tower, I would get better framerates etc. right? Or would the mobo bus put a chokehold on that?
The B&W has a 100MHz bus and
The B&W has a 100MHz bus and PC-100 SDRAM. The Mini has a 167MHz bus and PC2700 DDR RAM. Plus an AGP-based GPU. With the B&W you're stuck with PCI. So, the Mini is faster in general, but the B&W is expandable.
Think AGP
I've seen the B&W's go for as little as $50 on eBay during the past months, before shipping, of course. Another thing to consider is the age of the B&W. You start pumping up all the speed inside it and you could wear out that old motherboard pretty fast. Replacement motherboards go for around $40, but what a hassle to have to deal with that. I've got two B&W's and they're happy machines, but seems like anytime I tinker or upgrade them, I always run into many time consuming problems to overcome.
How about an AGP G4 tower instead? You might snag one for a couple hundred if you keep your eyes open for one, especially now that the Macintels have arrived on the scene. Lots of people who have been waiting for those are probably going to start dumping their G4's, and when the software writers start abandoning the PowerPC, we all might witness a major dump of all pre-Intel Macs. Are you in a major metropolitan area? I watch the local Craigslist now for computers and I see a lot of good deals, and sometimes great deals, go by on that (Craigslist.com). You know how it is, you buy something you think is a good deal today, and a week later you see a great deal on something better you wished you had waited for instead. Happens all the time in my experience. Occassionally, there's deals that are too good to pass by, but $90 for a B&W is ok, but doesn't make my heart race. You might want to get closer to what will really do the trick for you, like a G4 tower. AGP sounds much more up your alley...or you could buy bowling shoes. Yowzer!
i can speak for killin a B&W
i can speak for killin a B&W just by stuffing its gills with stuff, and thats before the CPU upgrade.. i bought a new one and am leaving it just above stock for that main reason...
So you would suggest a G4 400
So you would suggest a G4 400mhz on the grounds it has an AGP card which is obviously better for gaming and its more stable with upgrades? Makes perfect sense... But I was wondering, how much more or less are the processor upgrades for these machines/(slash)what kind of ram do they take? If the upgrades are cheaper it does seem more logical and now that I think about it, it was a G4 400 Mhz that I used to play on, not a Blue and White.
Possibility?
http://www.applefritter.com/node/10469
Although, make sure it's a Sawtooth and not a Yikes! Yikes! didn't have AGP.
Yeah, I figured. But I talked
Yeah, I figured. But I talked to a guy who has the sawtooth with a suped up processor, agp card, and ram. He says that it barely plays alot of games becaues its agp is only 2x and not 4x agp... =\ I dunno.
edit: I saw that link you gave me... what would you think a good price for that is? 50 dollars?
That's a good point about 2x
That's a good point about 2x vs. 4x. Yeah, actually, if I were you, I'd be looking for at least a Quicksilver, but only you know your cost limits. In my mind, the Quicksilver was a turning point between the old Powermacs and the new Powermacs. The Quicksilver is like the minimum to hang out with the big boys, and these days you're only talking about a couple hundred bucks more for a used one over what you're looking at. Sometimes it's good to sit down and chart out all your needs and all your costs and what you think you'll be able to do without according to your budget. Of course, there's always the payment plan for a new Macintel. Good luck.