[Irinikus]

This Machine is fitted with the 450MHZ G3 CPU, the fastest that was officially released for this machine:





The G3 400MHz module looked like this:



Notice the difference in the cache chips.

There was an aftermarket chip released running @ 1GHz (PowerLogix PCIGX10001 PowerForce 750GX G3/1GHz (1000MHz)) Which featured on-die cache



It was based on this chip:

PowerPC 750GX
750GX (codenamed Gobi), revealed in 2004, was a 7xx processor from IBM. It has an on-die 1 MB L2 cache, a top frequency of 1.1 GHz, and support for bus speeds up to 200 MHz among other enhancements compared to 750FX. It is manufactured using a 0.13 μm process with copper interconnects, low-K dielectric, and silicon on insulator technology. The 750GX has 44 million transistors, a die size of 52 mm2 and consumes less than 9 W at 1 GHz at typical loads.

I just installed 1GB of RAM into the machine and take note of the fact that there is now no virtual memory usage: (It was initially using 435MB, which was considerable!)



This is how it looked with 256MB of memory installed for comparative purposes:



So this little upgrade within itself should improve system performance!

The system memory upgrade has marginally improved the system drive performance: (This is still the standard SCSI setup that the machine came with)



This was the original drive performance with 256MB of Ram installed:

[ghost180sx]

@irinikus, have you made any progress lately on your G3? This has been a great read. Personally, I still love OS9. I use a G4 AGP graphics model to run as my OS9 with a double height SCSI drive and an Orange Micro UltraSCSI (40MB/s) internal host adapter card. It flies!

I also have a G3 beige tower I intend to recap when I have time. It works but it's very intermittent and locks up often, no matter what I do and what hardware I swap in and out of the case.

[Irinikus]

[Shiunbird]

lovely machine - especially the sonnet card.

[Irinikus]

I've purchase this ZIF SONNET Encore 1GHz CPU upgrade for this machine from a seller in Japan, so this machine's on its way to being pimped out!!!











I've upgraded the system's PROM to take this CPU, as I wait for it to arrive from Japan:



This is the system's hard drive setup:



This is what it currently looks like on the inside:



In order to complete this build I still need to fit it with a Belkin USB 2.0 PCI card, A ZIP Drive (I already have the bezel) and 1GB of matched PC100 RAM (4x256MB DIMMS)

Then it will be completely MAXXED out!

[Shiunbird]

Wherever you unbury all the super rare addons from? 0_o

[Irinikus]

Wherever you unbury all the super rare addons from? 0_o

The trick is to know what exactly parts or systems you're looking for and have continuous automatic searches running for them!

---

My Sonnet Encore ZIF G4 1000MHz (1GHz) / 1M Processor Upgrade's on the way to me from Japan and I've successfully flashed the G3 B&W to accept it. In all the pictures of the CPU I haven't seen any evidence that the required jumper block has been shipped with it, so as a precaution I did some digging and was able to screen grab this image of the correct jumper positions off a YouTube video



And this image to verify the orientation of the jumper block: (As it shows the position of the little tab)



This info may be useful to anyone else who purchases one of these SONNETS!

[Irinikus]

My ZIF SONNET 1GHz G4 CPU Upgrade arrived form Japan today and it's now fitted and working perfectly:









Here's the updated System Info:



Here's the new Blender Test Result: (test.blend)



It's pretty much twice the speed of the 450MHz G3, so it's performing as advertised!!!

Here's the Quake 3 Time Demo Four Result:



With these settings:

[Irinikus]

Today I carried out some tests on the Sonnet upgraded G3 B&W and have come to some interesting conclusions, which I'll share later! (It's a significant upgrade in some ways, but not so significant in others!)

[Irinikus]