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The PowerForce G3 ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) is the super-fast, yet economical CPU upgrade for your "Beige" Power Mac G3 desktop or minitower, "G3 All-in-One" educational model, Blue and White Power Macintosh G3's and the Power Macintosh G4 "Yikes"
Care to compare benchmarks and see how the PowerForce G3 1.0GHz ZIF can accelerate a G3 or G4 ZIF based tower?
Click the picture of your machine below to see!
 
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PowerLogix opted for the low power IBM PowerPC 750GX/GL for this upgrade, instead of the Motorola G4s, due to a bug in the 745x chips when used with the Motorola bridge chip on the motherboard (the MPC106.) PowerLogix discovered this bug in 2001. The bug can be worked around, but it requires significant extra circuitry, raising the cost of the product, not to mention the extra cost of engineering development. For these older machines, we did not feel that this extra cost was merited. This extra circuitry also results in a lower bus speed being required on the 100 MHz systems (bus is slowed to 66 MHz on the Blue and White and PCI Graphics models.)
Although this ZIF model is a G3, make no mistake; it is a very fast performer. Remember, the only difference between a G3 and a G4 chip is Altivec. Altivec is a very specialized vector processor, and only a very small number of specific software tasks in some applications actually utilize it. The vast majority of mainstream applications still do not take advantage of Altivec. Even the Darwin kernel, at the heart of Mac OS X, is also not optimised to use Altivec in any way.
What this means, is that users are far better off with this faster G3, than with a slower G4 that might be able to use Altivec in some tasks. In other words, unless you are using Altivec constantly, it is better to have a CPU that runs all tasks faster all the time, than a CPU that runs slower all the time, except for a certain few occassionally used Altivec tasks.
For example, if you sometimes rip MP3s, the G4 will be faster on that specific task. But the G3 will be faster on every other task..so unless you rip MP3s all day long, the G3 is a better choice.
The PowerForce G3 ZIF offers the highest ratio of performance vs. price of any product available for these machines.
In many real world tests, a G3 800Mhz ZIF upgrade outperformed a similarly priced G4 500 card by nearly 2:1.
The Bottom Line: If you already have quite a bit invested in your Power Mac G3, it just makes good economic sense to upgrade the processor rather than opting for G4 or G5 systems from Apple. Apple has eliminated all of the legacy ports with the removal of the ADB port, not to mention the removal of the serial ports, as well as SCSI. So you can keep your investment in these peripherals as well.
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Compatible with the following:
