6/1/01 The 300 MHz G3 PowerMacs were a follow-on generation to the successful 233 & 266 MHz ones. They made their appearance in the early Spring of 1998 and were discontinued in the first few weeks of 1999.The machines came in both a desktop and mini-tower form factor and there were both standard models and build-to-order options.
When the G3/300 MT was first released MacAddict pitted it against an 8600/300, a machine with a 604e processor running at 300MHz. They found the G3/300 completed a suite of NortonUtilities tests that gave the G3 a score roughly 42% higher than the 8600. These scores reflect the advantages of the G3 over the 604e chip. The G3 chip found in the 300Mhz desktop model was a faster version of the PowerPC processor. It's speed was enhanced because the L2 cache resides on a dedicated backside bus running at 150 Mhz, between processor and cache. Previously L2 cache performance was limited by the speed of the main logic board bus which runs at a much slower speed.
The processor and cache reside in on a removable card that fits into a PC type Zif socket making it easy to replace with a faster processor. The main system bus of these G3 machines runs at 66Mhz (the previous Macs ran at 50Mhz). The G3/300 DT comes with 32 MB or 64 MB, and the MT with either 64 or 128 MB or SDRAM, expandable to 768 MB using the 3 DIMM sockets (standard profile 128MB DIMMs will not fit in the desktop machine).
The graphics controller is the ATI 3D Rage II+, though later models came with the Rage Pro as standard. The DT machine came standard with 2MB SGRAM graphics memory which allows for millions of colors (32-bit) at up to 832 x 624 resolution. Graphics memory is expandable to 6MB which will allow millions of colors at higher resolutions and faster 3D performance.The MT came standard with 6 MB
There are 3 PCI slots for add-on cards and a proprietary slot for the included personality card.
The hard drive is 6GB EIDE on the Desktop and a 4, dual 4 or 8.0 GB Ultra/Wide SCSI on the Tower (using a PCI SCSI card...which uses up one of the slots). The dual drive option could be configured into a RAID with included software. The CD ROM is 24x.
The Tower machine has one free 5.23" drive bay (the other is filled with the internal Zip drive) and both machines have external SCSI connectors (5Mbytes per second).
The machine's case is easy to get into and the simplicity of the new logic board design make upgrades a snap.
Below you will find the MacBench 5.0 results for most of the processor upgrades available for this machine.
** Note that MacBench does not take advantage of the Velocity Engine (AltiVec instructions) of the G4. For AltiVec accelerated applications you can see a 1.4 to 4 times performance improvement over the G3, depending on the application and the functions you are trying to perform.
"But I thought that the G4 was so much faster than the G3?" In some cases it is! For G4 Application specific scores - Click Here
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The processor and cache reside in on a removable card that fits into a PC type Zif socket making it easy to replace with a faster processor. The main system bus of these G3 machines runs at 66Mhz (the previous Macs ran at 50Mhz). The G3/300 DT comes with 32 MB or 64 MB, and the MT with either 64 or 128 MB or SDRAM, expandable to 768 MB using the 3 DIMM sockets (standard profile 128MB DIMMs will not fit in the desktop machine). 
