Upgrading a
Macintosh Blue and White G3

The Blue and White G3 was a radical departure from the Beige G3's in terms of appearance, closely following on the Bondi blue iMac in terms of industrial design.

I always thought this was a bold and very cool fashion statement. No doubt about what was inside this Macintosh.

Pop the latch on the side to expose all the internal components of this Mac. The motherboard is at the front of the photo while the hard drives sit in the bottom of the case while the CD and optional Zip drive sit up top ahead of the power supply. There are four dimm slots which accept either PC100 or PC133 3.3v 168 pin DIMMs. I currently run 4x256mb dimms for a total of 1gb or memory.

Depending on the version of Blue and White G3 you own you might find that you have IDE or SCSI hard drives. All the G3 B&W's in my collection are the 450mhz server version which shipped with an Ultra2 SCSI card and twin 9GB Seagate Cheetah SCSI hard drives. The motherboard also had provision for IDE hard drives and the lower end models of the B&W actually shipped with IDE drives instead. On my 450 I can install stacked ATA 133 drives in the left bay using the dual stacked mounting bracket from a G4 as well as the ribbon cable. There are reports that rev A motherboards do not support two drives.

Apple was kind enough to identify the various flavours of B&W towers, the 450mhz was the fastest that they shipped and the server with dual SCSI drives was the top of the line at the time.

Like the later G4 tower the B&W used a caddy to mount the built in CD rom and optional Zip drive. All the cabling was included with these computers and with my 450 I also received the optional faceplate that allowed access to the drive when mounted internally. Of note, I currently use a Pioneer DVR-106 that was swapped out of my G5 DP when I upgraded it to a Pioneer DVR-115. A very easy swap although I have had some issues with booting from and installing OSX Tiger from the retail version installation disks. Booting from the OS 9.2 install disks work fine. You could always load the OS from another Mac such as a G4 which is what I wound up doing. Once loaded the G3 seems to be running just fine.

A built in modem was an option in the G3 server not that I missed it but since I had one in the parts bin I tossed it in.

The B&W G3 has 4 PCI slots, though one is populated with an ATI Rage Pro PCI video card. This card BTW works perfectly in Beige G3 computers. It is however only VGA output. In the other slots I have a 6 port Adaptec USB 2 card and finally an Adaptec SCSI card which shipped with this computer from Apple. Also note the IDE cable to the left of the PCI slots. The second cable snakes though the case to the CD and Zip.

A nice big power supply.

The business end of the B&W G3. That white bar like thing at the top left is a pull out tab that you can thread a lock through. This keeps the case from being easily opened.

A full assortment of ports on the rear of the G3, from top to bottom. Dual Firewire 400, ADB (note this is the last Mac to support ADB keyboards, mice and peripherals), ethernet, modem, dual USB 1 ports, microphone and speaker plugs.

Just below the ports are the 4 PCI card slots, the top slot is populated with the video card while the second has my Adaptec USB 2 card and finally the SCSI card.

Just like the Beige G3's the B&W has a Zif socket for the CPU allowing you to do easy upgrades to faster processors. My particular B&W has a PowerLogix 1000 MHz G3 processor installed. I notice some performance gains with this card though I'm hard pressed to say it feels twice as fast. The card works well so far with none of the problems I have had with the Sonnet G4 500mhz card. With both the Sonnet and PowerLogix cards you don't need to change the jumpers on the motherboard the processor speed can be controlled on the PowerLogix with the supplied control panel.

My B&W was just upgraded with a PowerLogix G3 1000 MHz cpu which was picked up from Other World Computing. I don't find it a lot faster so far but heck it was cheap. PowerLogix does say in the installation information that System profiler will not give a true reading of the CPU speed and sure enough it and Gauge Pro say the cpu is running at 648-650 MHz. Using PowerLogix CPU director SW which must be loaded in order to ramp up their processors speed it does indicate I'm at 1000 MHz.

Size does matter, the B&W is not a small computer but it is dwarfed by the Beige G3 All-in-one!
For those who need specific component compatibility the B&W G3 is the ticket, it is also fairly easy to upgrade. Though with today's prices on G4 dual processor Macs it seems to me that this isn't as good a buy as the DP G4 is only a few dollars more expensive but seems to be a bit more stable with installers such as OSX 10.4. Still for the serious Mac collector this is a MUST HAVE due to the coolness factor of the case.

Comments? Feel free to e-mail me at kevino@newsroom.net.