Upgrading my B&W G3...

In the mid-to-late year of 2004, I was still running Mac OS 9.1 on my Mac. I had long since weighed the cost of getting my Mac up to par for it to run OS X, but there were too many things in the way. For instance, the major roadblock in this was the fact that I was using a 3Dfx Voodoo 5500 PCI video card, which wasn't compatible at all with OS X.

Don't get me wrong, the Voodoo was a nice card. It did me more than well enough for all my needs while I was running OS 9. Sadly, though, 3Dfx folded before they could get around to making OS X drivers for their Mac cards. I even read an interview, from around the time of OS X's debut, with someone from 3Dfx stating that they were working on the necessary drivers. Too bad though that never seemed to happen.

Well, luck got me in late 2004. A nice gift from someone ( ^_^ ) left me with sufficient funds to get the job done. I immediatly set about budgeting it out to better use it. My first purchase was a recently-released ATI Radeon 9200 Mac Edition PCI video card. While not exactly a Radeon 9800, it was the best we PCI video-based Mac useres could hope for. 2D speed was equal with that of the Voodoo but 3D was somewhat faster.

Now, as for as getting OS X on my Mac, things were pretty much complete. The final step needed to complete the upgrade was the actual copy of the latest OS X version, which was 10.3 or Panther at the time. For this, I looked at various online stores and finally picked Other World computing as the vendor of choice. They had the Mac OS X.3 CDs that were included with an eMac for a reasonable price. It was only a matter of days till I had 10.3 installed nice and cozy.

Mac OS X was extremely snappy and played very well with things. Of course, the 450MHz (overclocked 400MHz) G3 chip I had in my Mac left things to be desired when it came to games. I had set my sights on a nice Powerlogix or Sonnet Technology processor upgrade to ease these speed problems. In the end, the Powerlogix upgrades seemed to be the best bet as Sonnet's had some performance issues that I didn't like. Unfortuneatly, my funds had long since decreased below the range of either of these upgrades. All seemed lost but Christmas was slowly drawing near.

Luckily for me, my father was extra generous on his presents and purchased a Powerlogix 1.0GHz G3 upgrade for both his and mine B&W G3. The speed improvements in everything was just grand.

It wasn't long, though, till I looked for ways to squeeze every last bit of performance from my Mac. The Powerlogix upgrade came with its little configuration app called CPU Director that easily allowed me to overclock the processor to a modest 1.1GHz in no time. The video card was just as easy. A program known as ATIccelerator II allowed on-the-fly overclocking of the Radeon in small incremental steps to ensure that I don't burn it out.Thus so, I boosted things to the most they could take and that's how things are to this day.

Well, that was pretty long and in-depth. I'm quite proud of it.