A G3 Upgraded TAM... with SATA?!

today's terrible price to Performance ratio is brought to you by Squarespace but more on that in a bit okay I am so excited for today's build it's been a long time in the making for the past year I've been slowly amassing a big old box full of upgrades that I'm pretty sure are going to work in our obscure goofball 20th anniversary Macintosh I'm talking see the controller card SSD max out memory and uh yeah a very obscure processor upgrade we're going to turn the weirdest Mac of the 1990s into an absolute Powerhouse so stay tuned foreign and if you enjoy turning back the clock to a simpler time in Computing and then hot rodding the ever-loving crap out of it I hope you'll consider subscribing to the channel we spare no expense turning E-Waste into e wonderful so it's definitely worth sticking around in last week's video about this rare example of Apple's late 90s descent into madness we restored this 20th anniversary Macintosh to all of its 1997 Glory well we took some Liberties like way cooler speaker cloth to replace the deteriorated original and of course the CD-ROM drive still doesn't work because of that stupid plastic rubbing cable but other than that it's beautiful and mostly fully functional if you want to hear the full back story on this hard to find Apple flop check out the previous video right here but we won't stand for just fully functional around here which is why for the past year or so I've been slowly researching and hunting down upgrades that I think are going to work fine in this Tam here you see I've had this monster for probably close to a year now and since then as I've been slowly accumulating cool stuff I've been surreptitiously testing it in other Macs before putting it into the Tam sometimes in other videos here like this sonnet G3 400 megahertz we actually tested this out in a umax super Mac Mac clone a couple weeks ago check that video out right here and uh yeah it worked great in there so it should work great in the very similar architectured 20th anniversary Mac so I'm really excited about this build today because it's the first time in a long time where I'm pretty sure all of these upgrades are gonna just work oh no I just jinxed it but before we dig into this box of upgrade fun a quick word about today's sponsor Squarespace create a fast beautiful and Rich web experience for your business or brand using squarespace's powerful all-in-one platform it's really easy to get started like say I wanted to build a website all about the secret Genius of Johnny Ive in his wonderful 20th anniversary Mac not only can I build it in minutes with Squarespace but it would be well designed responsive and mobile friendly there's a ton of beautiful templates that I could choose to start from and from there it's simple to build a great looking site that's also fast responsive and works great on mobile devices with squarespace's extensive built-in tool set I can also optimize for SEO manage a mailing list check my analytics and much more all geared towards managing your entire web presence so check out squarespace.com action retro today for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use code action retro to save 10 of your first purchase of a website or domain all right so let's talk about these upgrades because uh yeah the Tam isn't exactly conducive to a ton of upgrades because well it's quite thin so how we're gonna fit all of these upgrades in here well great question coming closer and let me show you this back comes right off exposing a whole host of upgradeability a PCI slot a com slot to your memory your hard drive a goofy little fan here all the stuff that you'd want but how on Earth could a PCI card fit in this card slot here well there's an app for that and by app I mean an apple branded PCI Riser car that puts your PCI card down the back like this mounted upside down and vertically but there's still not enough room to put this back piece on here so there's another app for that and by app of course I mean Apple expanded back panel which yeah provides more than enough clearance at the cost of a little bit of girth but on the back of the machine where you'd never see it and yeah I'd much rather have expandability than pure slim design but this ethernet card is kind of stupid instead we want to have our SATA controller card so that's one card in here and if we want to have ethernet as well we can also use a com slot card in this com slot adapter that goes over top and around the PCI card so that's kind of cool but still I want to see if we can fit even more stuff in here so I'm really curious I found this two slot PCI visor cord that's from a different Mac and uh yeah I'm pretty sure that this would work in here just fine okay so before we actually mess around with this awesome G3 upgrade I want to do a fresh install of Mac OS 9 using the SATA controller card with a SATA SSD to make sure that all of that's working and also to give us a good Baseline to take benchmarks on so we can see your before and after on the performance gain from this upgrade okay so we have our SATA controller card here mounted and uh yeah we're gonna need to connect something to it so I've got a SATA cable here and of course we need to provide Power to whatever stated device and uh yeah it's not like the Tam has SATA power connectors built in so I have an idea and bear with me it's a little bit cursed what better say the device to test this thing with than the superdrive out of a Mac Pro yeah in case we need to burn any DVDs on our Tam now for power I've got some power connectors here with uh Ceta to Molex and there's a Molex connector in here for the CD-ROM drive but if this doesn't work I don't want to just tear apart this whole thing again for no reason so we're going to power the drive externally turn this on here oh yeah a 20th anniversary Macintosh with a super drive out of a Mac Pro on Internal Sata powered externally [Music] and I'll just give this a burned copy of the Tam restore disk to see if this works I hear it's spinning up in there look it worked there it is uh a Mac Pro superdrive running over SATA connected to a tam and it works apparently just fine command e to eject it works just fine so we actually have a bunch of options for new internal hard drive to replace this uh old spinning disc on IDE and all of my options are probably equally ridiculous well we're gonna use a SATA SSD here brand new we can of course use a SATA to IDE adapter and I got this very little one that would allow this to kind of fit in the same slot there that the original hard drive was mounted in and still have this adapter option number two of course is to plug this in to the other port on the say the controller card plug it into power here and I think what I want to do is just run benchmarks hooked up to the SATA controller and hooked up to the SATA adapter and see if there really is a big difference in speed and whichever way is fastest and well assuming they both work that's the one we'll keep all right we are booted off the installer from the superdrive and let's see if we can find and then format the SSD and there it is look not initialized over scuzzy which is the SATA card let's initialize it okay different idea I've booted into the power computing boot CD so I can use hard disk toolkit to format that drive instead of the Apple original utility because this should be able to format just about anything whereas the Apple utility is looking for Apple specific drives and probably has no idea what to do with a SATA controller card all right let's try to install Mac OS 9.1 hard drive toolkit for the win okay so I want to mount this where the original hard drive went and uh yeah I have this a little bit longer SATA to Molex adapter that I'd like to run from the CD-ROM drive in there out through the back of the case hopefully just using an existing hole but I think we're gonna have to crack this whole thing back open again to do it okay so here's the guts of the Tam and uh in the last video it was pretty funny how many of you commented kind of how janky this was all taped together from the factory and kind of woven cables everywhere did I mention that they rushed this to Market in the 90s because they certainly did anyway our power cable for the CD-ROM drive is down here and since the cable inside the drive is broken yeah we don't really need that right now okay so what I've done is threaded a little extension through so here is the original Molex and I've just kind of wired it through here so it comes out the front with a Molex connector that we can just connect our little SATA power splitter to and that way there's enough length if we want to run that external DVD ROM drive and also run our hard drive okay so what I want to do now is Benchmark the SSD on a SATA to IDE connector versus running it off of our SATA controller card so I'm going to first hook this up to the old IDE connector and we'll take a first Benchmark here I'll take a second Benchmark here and then I'll jump cut to the results well as is probably no surprise to anyone the dedicated SATA card is not only much faster than the built-in IDE but it is comically faster alright well that answer is that question State a controller card it is okay and on the back here I have the SATA SSD all mounted up and powered and we're gonna use the Dual SATA Riser card and on this card we're going to use a USB 1.1 card which this team is very picky about usb cards and I think this is the only one that will definitely work because it's s-i-i-g and then I took the front panel off of these SATA controller card because we don't need a blank front panel hanging around and uh yeah we have pretty limited space inside the machine connect it up power is connected and for fan I'm uh going a little bit of a different direction I've taken out this weird little fan here and we're putting in of course a noctua on double-sided tape for now to blow right down on that spot and yeah I know it's pretty silly double-sided taping this to the USB card but hey pray I don't get any sillier actually if future upgrades pan out for this machine I may just use this gigantic ridiculous fan and how will we know that the USB card works well Apple Pro mouse of course in all of its lasery Glory all right booting The Tam with our Mouse installed and our dual PCI Riser cord and uh yeah we'll see if this stuff works Mouse is not on yet but it hasn't loaded the USB driver yet as soon as it does this should come on ah look there it is it's red USB on the Tam all right we're booted up and everything seems to be fine I'm going to take some pre-g3 processor benchmarks and uh yeah and then it's time for the final boss installing this beautiful Sonic G3 400 with 512k of cash okay so this is a pretty weird upgrade if you've seen the umax video you already know but they called this the G3 upgrade for upgrade challenged Max because this doesn't actually replace the processor it replaces the cash card which is right here and then this bypasses the processor that's on the board and we'll have to install its extension as well yeah but that's it I am probably going to do this I'll just have to design some sort of 3D printed bracket okay so to get that processor upgrade working we just have to install its extension and uh restart [Music] yes there it is Crescendo G3 it's working G3 upgraded Tam let's check out system profiler oh my God look at that go away Network time error 400 megahertz power PC G3 in our 20th anniversary MacIntosh and I've also upgraded the memory to that maximum 128 while you weren't looking and that's working just fine too with a hard drive on SATA and a USB card using an apple Pro mouse oh my God this is the most ridiculous Tam let's take our benchmarks and we'll compare it to the ones I took before the upgrade all right well with our D3 processor we have more than doubled our performance even though the clock speed isn't doubled 250 versus 400 just that G3 man that is awesome look at that Improvement let's have a little bit of 400 megahertz fun with some Carmageddon and our external internal Mac Pro superdrive it's still so funny all right here we go let's see if these upgrades were worth it oh this sounds awesome hang on to your helmet three three oh it works great awesome Carmageddon on the Tam oh my God just because I have a good frames per second doesn't mean I have a good gaming Sensibility I haven't got a good hit in on anybody oh no well that was fun while it lasted okay so that'll do it for today's Tam flavored Shenanigans and uh I am so excited for this machine this is one of my all-time Holy Grail machines and to think just how Wild all of these upgrades are G3 400 megahertz SATA on a SATA controller card USB lovely black speakers and of course an external internal Superdry from a Mac Pro now there's still a lot of things that I'd like to do to this uh for one I'd like to see if I can finagle the guts of this superdrive into the spot where the original vertical CD-ROM drive went but uh I think that'll take some real finagling because the mechanism to tell if a CD is inserted is totally different and no spoilers yet but I do have some other plans for this processor upgrade I have no idea if it's going to come to fruition so I won't say any more now but make sure you subscribe to the channel because yeah I think this Tam can be even more timbrific but if you enjoyed this video I'd appreciate a thumbs up if you'd like to see more Tam Shenanigans like this please subscribe down below and thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to Camilla noseda Chris alegreta Chris Biggs Chris Calderon Chris Nelson Cobalt retro Tech Control Alt Reese Daniel Hubbard Dwight a Spencer Greg from rut K mods Paul Spencer Ryan Scott Thompson and Sue Tech who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping to make these videos possible thank you

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 47,434

Keywords: retro, vintage computers, macintosh, apple, retrocomputing, retro computers

Id: 3kKZl-YJmkk

Length: 20min 42sec (1242 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 15 2022