Welcome to this massive PowerPC goodness crammed series. During these videos, we’ll be packing the absolute best technology that this machine can support into this gorgeous Blue & White G3 minitower, creating what I believe will be the fastest B&W G3 on the planet. This is the most involved Power Mac upgrade series I’ve ever produced, changing every single major component in this box and adding as much as I can to make this machine fly. Sit back, relax and enjoy some mighty fine PowerPC geeky goodness.
This is a series of very long videos detailing the entire process. Not the flashiest production values – but honestly, that’s a good thing. The creator’s excitement is contagious, and it makes me want to undertake a similar project. Just tons of fun to watch, sit back, and relax.
Thanks for sharing. I really enjoyed watching these videos, definitely going to follow him on YouTube. I agree, his enthusiasm is contagious. Gotta love vintage computing!
This is the guy I followed when I was upgrading my MacBook Pro 2013 recently. Very good guy, very informative.
Ha! I can completely understand this guy’s enthusiasm. I’ve been there with the G3 Goassamer, B&W Smurf Tower and later a DA. Also fun with the oldies like my 7100AV with the 450mhz G3.
I still have them all. The Smurf Tower though will run at 1.2ghz with that powerlogix G3 accel. It does get pretty hot so some thermal epoxy will help. If you want to go beyond 1.2ghz (112mhz fsb) upto 1.4 you need to fiddle around with the VRU and some fun SMD soldering, so it’s slightly over-voltage. Support chips *will* need heat sinks and I lost a PCI slot. Bye bye USB2/FW400 card.
I didn’t use SSD’s back then and instead used a 36gb WD Raptor (10krpm) drive. SSD’s back then were not available yet. 1gb RAM, Radeon 9800Pro AGP on a krushin(? bit-rot memory.. it’s been a while) AGP2PCI adapter flash hacked off a PC (much small-dogs forums and bootleg proms!), 64bit PCI-X SATA adapter from OWC. Lots of fun.
Eventually I fed the Smurf the 750mhz (@850)G4 so I could run PCI-Extreme to enable 10.4’s quartz on a PCI socket (despite the agp card in the adapter). It’s not been booted since about 2008 and stored.
That’s when I got the DA with the dual 1.8ghz 7447b’s to over clock and have yards of fun with.
Yeah, I completely understand this guy’s enthusiasm and excitement. I also remember the days when myself and a few others (hi JB, Strawberry (Nizzle), Hippo and Mustang!) were pimp-tuning our Gossamers, Smurfs and DA’s. Really was a lot of fun.
A great era.
Apple lost a lot of cred when they stopped making half-decent UNIX RISC workstations and started making media consumption devices.
This thing was cutting edge when it came out and cost thousands of dollars and today you can buy a system that has 16gb of RAM, 8 cores, Tbs of storage, and a GPU that has more memory and a faster processor than that system completely maxxed out for like $500. Heck todays $100 cellphones beat this machine in every measure.
That just amazes me, how we had these little increments for many years and then everything just exploded, as someone who started messing with computers when the most expensive systems still had single digit Mhz CPUs and memory measured in kilobyte? It just blows my mind how far we’ve come.
But we basically do the same stuff : office, little prog, games and divx, erk, mkv. Just with a better picture and sound quality. And faster.
We have all the Internet, even on our phones, but we not managed to maximizee our IQ and beat Stephen Hawking. At least we can ‘like’ things.
yep, and most people only get as far as liking Facebook and insta pictures the whole days, …
I actually like to work with my vintage systems from time to time, like the Cube, G5, … (sucks so much power tough), recently even soldered a new NVRAM battery to my UltraSPARC 5, …
also really silly what worst case UI hang software even gets on latest high end machines, … be it macOS or Windows, … try to save or print something and sometimes it hangs forever, …
Now that I think about it, macOS network share performance is also strange vintage slow, …
The problem is how people think about algorithms and APIs.
I’m really hoping that the growing interest in designing language features which aid concurrent development, such as Go’s goroutines and Rust’s ownership-based data-race prevention, herald that things are finally starting to shift.
Edited 2017-04-15 02:20 UTC
Mostly standing as decoration on my desk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K645WWl0Ff4
should really put it to more use 😉 https://t2-project.org/hardware/workstation/Apple/Cube/
Edited 2017-04-14 08:46 UTC