G3 and Panther - Decent Performance?


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I have a friend who is picking up an old G3 from my other friend (I believe it is a 350 mhz model with 512 of ram), and naturally he wants to install Panther on it, now my first obvious question is... is this even possible?

And if it is possible, what kinds of issues/problems/concerns will he possibly run into by doing so? Anything I should consider disabling right away for better performance? Stuff along those lines...

Any and all suggestions/help is greatly appreciated, as we plan on taking this endeavor tomorrow afternoon...

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It will run as long as the computer has USB built in. You might want to max out the RAM but it should run okay, don't expect great performance.

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I know people that have installed it on slower machines and it works okay. What kind of G3 is it?

don't know for sure... just know it is one of the first generation of g3's... i just got into the loop today on it

thanks to everyone else for their responses so far, well see what happens, and if anyone else has anything to contribute it is greatly appreciated...

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If it is an iMac or a Blue and White G3 tower then you are fine. If it is anything else Panther may not work since it requires USB to be built in. I think there is a program out there to get around this but I don't know what it is called.

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You can use panther on an older g3 without built in USB by using the program XPostFacto :woot: . I have read many things about people using it and getting older macs to run panther, but have never tried it myself.

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If it is an iMac or a Blue and White G3 tower then you are fine. If it is anything else Panther may not work since it requires USB to be built in. I think there is a program out there to get around this but I don't know what it is called.

cool thanks NinjaMonkey, I know for sure it was the Blue (teal I like to call it LOL) and White g3 tower, so I think it is probably good to go! So I will find out tomorrow when it is dropped on my front steps (literally) for formatting.

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If it is a B&W tower, congrats you are set to go. You might want to up the RAM eventually to a gig (I think that is the max for that system). Let me know if have any other questions.

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400mhz powerbook here, runs like a dream, so much faster than jaguar its unbelievable, even the games i have on here run faster :)

even without quarts extreme?

btw, does the blue and whites support quartz extreme? i no it has 16 mb video but i dunno

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QuartzExtreme requires 16MB of video RAM which is what the B&W came with stock. I thought it was 32 but I went and double checked it.

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Quartz Extreme requires either GeForce 2 or higher, or a ATI Radeon or higher.

I thought the G3 tower came with an ATI Rage chip, if so your out of luck.

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Quartz Extreme requires a AGP gfx card.

Im not sure if that computer will have a AGP slot.

If not you can always get a PCI ATI Radeon gfx card and use a patch called 'PCI Extreme' which will enable Quartz Extreme (only works with Radeon gfx cards).

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400mhz powerbook here, runs like a dream, so much faster than jaguar its unbelievable, even the games i have on here run faster :)

Agree completely. Same situation here.

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Just in case someone else has the same question down the road... it worked smooth as can be... and actually the card was a PCI card and not AGP, and it still works absolutely fine... the only slight "hitch" graphically, and it really is minor, is when using Expose, the animation of the windows going in and out is just not super smooth, that is literally it. Everything else works as normal and as fine as can be so far.

Thanks to everyone that responded.

DL

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No problem. People seem to forget that G3's actually do run pretty well with Panther (better than they did with previous versions in fact). That is why when I see people say "I would like to get a Mac but they are too expensive", I generally tell them to look for an older G3 on eBay. You can literally find them for under $250 (although most of those will need some extra RAM to handle OS X).

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