Upgrade a iMac G3 past 6gb HDD and 256mb RAM? and how much??

[BoomBox-Creations]

Well...

i have a old iMac G3 that i want to uprade to atleast a 40gb Hard Drive and atleast 1gb of RAM and if theres a video card that tops 512mb that replaces the 2mb stock would be great...

If i can get it to atleast a 80gb Hard Drive and 2gb of RAM it will be great...


Im going to develop some apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch... and for that i need a mac....

The G3 is the only mac i have.... and im too cheap to buy a new one.. even if it is a Mac Mini...


So if anyone knows how much that will cost me to update all the hard ware inside to those specs it will be appreciated....



Ive already pulled it apart and putting it in a differnet case.... theres not enough room in there to change all the stuff that i need...

and the only other thing ive upgraded is the 2 USB 1.1 ports to 4 USB 2.0 ports....

[Sparkfist]

What kind a of a G3 are you talking about? The old gray all-in-one beige? An iMac, and if it is, is it a tray or slot loading CD-ROM? Is it the PowerMac, and if it is, is it a Rev. 1 or 2 motherboard?

I personally have a PowerMac Rev.2, and it will support up to around 700MB ram, and 128GB hard drive on each channel.

If you want to check things for yourself, lowendmac.com is the best place I know of. They have details about variations in designs, year by year models, and other details about computers. It should be able to tell you anything you might want.

-Sparkfist

[Black Six]

Indeed, we need to know exactly which iMac you have before we can help you. Check out this page.

Upgrading the hard drive should be a piece of cake. The best you can hope for RAM is 1GB, but the earlier models can only go up to 256MB or 512MB. There's really no way you can update the video card, as it's integrated with the motherboard.

[bicostp]

Please tell me you're actually talking about an iMac, not a Power Mac. (Power Mac G3s and up take regular RAM and PCI or AGP video cards, as long as the card supports the PPC architecture. I don't know if you can just slap in any old PC video card, since some have a supplementary BIOS that gets loaded even before the hard drive is accessed.)

Good luck with the video card. Only the first (and I think second) G3 iMacs have an expansion slot on the motherboard, and I think the newest video card they made for it was a Voodoo2, which will chug through anything newer than Unreal Tournament.

It should be able to take any regular DIMM up to 256 MB. (The 350 mhz ones on up can support 2 512 MB sticks for a total of 1 GB.) None of the CRT based iMacs can handle more than 1 gig of RAM. (Which is plenty for OS 9.2, which is what you should be running on it.)
http://kahlon.com/globalsearch.asp?crit ... submit3=Go" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Im going to develop some apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch... and for that i need a mac....

Well you're not going to be able to do it on your iMac G3. The iPhone SDK requires Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.5) or later, which absolutely will not run on a 300 mhz G3. (It requires an 850 mhz G4 at a bare minimum, and at least twice as much RAM as the early iMacs support.)

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/d ... nesdk.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v ... quirements" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

EDIT

and the only other thing ive upgraded is the 2 USB 1.1 ports to 4 USB 2.0 ports....

How did you do that with no expansion slots? A USB 2.0 hub plugged into a USB 1.1 port doesn't give you USB 2.0 capability, it just makes more 1.1 ports. Is it one of the DV models? They had USB 2.0 built in.

[SpongeBuell]

Sounds like you are trying to put spinners, a few subs, a racing engine, a new paint job, and fuzzy dice on an old Geo Metro (Sorry, John... ). Even if it can be done, there are much better uses for that money, and you still have, well, a Geo.

[Bibin]

Yes, any device that can run Mac OS X Leopard will do it. Actually, I have successfully booted and used Mac OS X Leopard on a Titanium PowerBook at 450Mhz, with 384MB ram, and it's quite usable. The iPhone SDK does run, but it's slow. Also, getting the iPhone SDK to work on a non-intel mac requires some simple hacks; it'll work, but it'll be awful and slow and you can't test your apps on a real device.

The iMac G3 can't have it's video upgraded, at all. Mac OS X Tiger will be more than usable with at least 512M ram at that point for basic stuff. I have a Power Mac G3 with some ruddy video card, a 300mhz G3, and 512MB SDRAM, and it runs tiger just fine as long as I don't throw youtube at it.

[BoomBox-Creations]

it is not a slot loader. it is a 333mhz one of the fruit colour ones...

Its the green lime one...





Well... something that bicostp posted, if that is the case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v ... quirements" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

i might have to buy a new one...

I only wanted to get this thing working so i could chuck it/sell it to someone else when i had made the first iPhone app, and but a new one...



ok then.... if admins now want to lock this thread now... feel free... ive found out what ive wanted...

[Black Six]

Closerized.