... Well, January, really. I asked about upgrade options for a Beige G3 in a thread entitled "Should I stay or should I go?" (Musical readers will note a theme here.)
Gene Osburn & Michael Thibault both recommended overclocking it as a cheaper option to spending money on it. Well, I've gotten very frustrated with its performance of late, what with setting up an iMac DV for a client and finding that 350MHz machine to be /considerably/ faster in OS X than my 300MHz one. I've been scouring eBay for cheap G3 or G4 accelerators but there's nothing I can afford coming up there in recent months. So tonight, being unexpectedly in and bored on a Friday night, I went for it and took the screwdriver and tweezers to my own Mac. I've gone primarily for front-side bus speed rather than absolute clock speed, upping the bus from 66MHz to its maximum 83MHz (25%) more, at a lower multiplier (4x instead of 4.5x), which keeps the PCI bus at a standard 33MHz. This seems to run perfectly happily. I tried a 3.5x multiplier but the machine wouldn't even "bong" at 375MHz - not that I really expected it to. 366MHz might have been doable but that means a standard FSB and I reckon that matters a lot. (Some observers online have conducted experiments with careful measurements and disagree, but this suits me - I'm being cautious.) While I was at it, I've used PowerLogix' free CPU Director tool to up my backside cache speed, too, from 167MHz (it was 150MHz before the overclock) to 222Mhz - a ratio of 3:2 instead of 2:1. Seems perfectly solid so far. And all in all the machine is quite dramatically snappier. It's not /transformed/ but it boots faster, programs load faster, opening submenus from the Dock is faster... I'm surprised and gratified. This may be quite a worthwhile move for an old Mac with bugger-all resale value. Recommended! Details here: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G3_OC/tims.html and here: http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/%7Et-imai/maine.html -- Liam P. Posted from a rare beast: a Beige G3 333MHz, running OS X 10.3.8 :-) GMail is now usable on this old girl! -- Unsupported OS X is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Unsupported OS X list info <http://lowendmac.com/lists/unsupported.html> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[email protected]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive <http://www.mail-archive.com/unsupportedosx%40mail.maclaunch.com/> iPod Accessories for Less at 1-800-iPOD.COM Fast Delivery, Low Price, Good Deal www.1800ipod.com
