Equipped with a 233, 266, 300, 333, or 366 MHz PowerPC G3 CPU from Motorola, these machines used a 66 MHz system bus and PC66 SDRAM, and standard ATA hard disk drives instead of the SCSI drives used in most previous Apple systems however, they retained a legacy Fast SCSI chain (up to 5 MB/sec, seven devices internal and external).
The beige Power Macintosh G3 series came in three versions: an " Outrigger" desktop enclosure inherited directly from the Power Macintosh 7300 a minitower similar to (but shorter than) the Power Macintosh 8600 enclosure and a version with a built in screen, the G3 All-In-One ("AIO"), that was made available only to educational markets.
Despite demand from high-end users for more PCI slots in a G3 powered computer, the prototype was never developed into a shipping product.
Power macintosh roms full#
The Power Macintosh G3 was originally intended to be a midrange series, between the low-end Performa/ LC models and the six-PCI slot Power Macintosh 9600.Īpple developed a prototype G3-based six-slot full tower to be designated the Power Macintosh 9700. As a result, these machines were widely considered to be faster than Intel PCs of similar CPU clock speed at launch, an assertion that was backed up by benchmarks performed by Byte Magazine, which prompted Apple to create the " Snail" and "Toasted Bunnies" television commercials. The Power Mac G3 introduced a fast and large Level 2 backside cache to Apple's product lineup, running at half processor speed. It was succeeded by the Power Macintosh G3 (Blue & White), which kept the name but introduced a radically different design. It was the first Macintosh to use the PowerPC G3 (PPC750) microprocessor, and replaced a number of earlier Power Macintosh models, in particular the 7300, 86 models. The Power Macintosh G3, commonly called "beige G3s" or "platinum G3s" for the color of their cases, is a series of personal computers that was designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer, Inc.