My second Mac - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

8 Jan 2007

...
 Date: Sat, 6 Jan 2007 12:57:06 -0800 (PST)
From: Cameron Kaiser <spectre at floodgap.com> 
...
 >  I picked up another Mac yesterday--a beige 300
Mhz G3 with 256MB, 
...
    On a
side-by-side with a Win2K P1 225MHz system with the same amount
  of memory, I think the WIndoze box has snappier response and has
  better video. 
The beige G3 has only a Rage II+ card by default. The later Revision 2 and
3 use Rage Pro. Thus, I think the video issue you're noticing is probably
the accelerator. The original 300 is almost certainly Revision 1. 
The video chip can be visually examined, although the "Wings" card 
(AV card) may be in the way.   It will have Rage II or Rage Pro (or 
Rage Turbo?) printed on it.   You may also be able to get this 
information from Apple system Profiler in the Apple menu.

If the ROM DIMM has not been switched out, you can determine your 
revision by looking at the ROM revision in the first page of Apple 
System Profiler.  Under "Production Information" look at "ROM 
Revision".  If it is $77D.40F2 then you have a Revision A ROM.   If 
this ROM shipped with this motherboard then you also have a revision 
1 motherboard.    However, the ROM DIMM is pretty easy to switch so 
there's no guarantee that the machine contains the ROM it originally 
shipped with and all of the ROM revisions work with all of the 
motherboard revisions.

If the ROM revision is $77D.45F1 it is a revision B.   If it is 
$77D.45F2 it is a revision C and absent ROM swapping the machine 
probably has a RAGE Pro video chip.

If you have a Rev. A ROM, then the built-in IDE channels in the 
machine will only support 1 device per channel.   You need Rev. B or 
C ROM for two device support per channel.

You can also determine your ROM revision by looking at the Apple part 
number on the two ROM chips on the ROM DIMM.   However, I don't 
remember the numbers.  It's something like 341S0409 and 0408 is Rev. 
A, 341S0494 adn 0495 is Rev. C and I've never seen a Rev. B with the 
part numbers on it so I can't say, but I imagine it's 341S04xx with 
xx up close to 90.

No matter which motherboard you have, switching to a B or C ROM will 
enable two device support on the IDE channels.

...
 You might as well get a Rage Orion and I think
you'll find the performance
much better. The Rage Orion is a 16MB Rage 128 PCI card, and I know from
personal experience that it is Mac-compatible and has good performance.
They're pretty cheap on the used market. 
Rage Orion was ATI's name for one of the Macintosh versions of the 
Rage 128.   PC versions of the Rage 128 won't work. (I am not 
contradicting Cameron, just restating his information a bit.)   It 
may be possible to do a conversion from PC version to Mac version, 
but I don't think anyone has ever reported a successful modification.

The Radeon 7000 works well in the Beige and the Sapphire version of 
the PCI card with DDR memory is easily converted to Macintosh use. 
It is also just $30 at Newegg.  Simply remove the eight pin SOIC 
serial flash chip and replace it with a blank ST Micro M25P10.   It 
should then either flash with the current Mac firmware updater from 
ATI or it may require the R7000-ROM-208 version.    It's been a 
while.  I know the latter will work.   I'm not sure about the former. 
Whichever way, update to the latest firmware afterwards, because 
there are some Sleep issues with earlier versions.

3D driver support is only official after OS 9.2 but if you install 
the Open GL 1.22 or 1.24 extensions by hand into OS 9.1 it works fine.

Jeff Walther