Upgrading a
Macintosh Beige G3 Desktop

The Beige G3 desktop makes quite a nice monitor stand.... ok it really is useful for a lot more than just this but it does put my widescreen at a nice height.

Slide back the top case by pushing in the two clips at the the front under the trim.

It packs a lot of components in a small and fairly easy to access space. Top left clockwise, hard drive on a caddy, floppy drive, CD rom on a caddy, and Zip drive which is also caddy mounted and raised up slightly with a custom spacer. The hard drive, CD and Zip are all IDE.

Getting inside is fairly painless as well. Pop open the left plastic cover, slide two clips and flip open the lid. Note that there is a plastic foot you can drop down to keep the tray from flopping to far to the right. If you are having troubles opening this Mac make sure you have unplugged the power cables as this will prevent you from opening the unit.

Just like the All-in-One and Tower you have lots of slots for upgrades. From the left, you have three PCI slots one of which can be taken up with a faster network or video card. Perch card slot just like the other Beige G3's, V ram slot (note this has a 4 mb chip which upgrades this Mac to 6 mb total), rom, and three dimm slots. The CPU is also Zif socketed so you can upgrade, Sonnet and Powerlogix sell G3 and G4 upgrades. I've had mixed success with G4 upgrades but great success with the G3 450 mhz cpu from the B&W G3 which drops right in with a jumper change. It winds up running at 455 mhz with a 70 mhz bus.

The jumper block is the yellow strip just above the three wired connectors at the base of the motherboard and to the left of the pram battery.

The slot on the left is for Vram, the middle brown slot is the ROM and the three slots to the right are memory., very easy to get at.

This is the card that normally comes with the All-in-one known as a whisper card, two ribbon cables attach to the card in the top slot and middle black slot. The bottom brown slot is for an optional modem card.

My Beige G3 desktop computer came with this AV card which has the AIO connectors thus allowing it to be used in the All-in-One. Oddly this card is being referred to as a whisper card on some sites even though it has a different part number and is a markedly different design.

This is the third of four Apple personality cards that fit the slot in an All-in-One and the Beige G3 tower and desktop. Known as the wings card, wings is also stamped on the card making it easy to identify. It also has yellow backed RCA plugs but does not have provision for connection to an All-in-One so it cannot be used. A fourth and fairly rare card is known as the Bordeaux card. (not pictured)

The desktop has a second hard drive caddy spot just in front of the motherboard it takes the standard Apple hard drive caddies of the time.

The Beige G3's are starting to show their age (2008) but still have some life left in them. The main use in my setup legacy media support since they support SCSI have internal Zip drives and were the last to have floppy drives though this is not supported in OSX. An upgrade I haven't attempted is installing an Adaptec Esata card in one of the PCI slots these can be found very cheap up here but they do not have Apple drivers.

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