Should I upgrade or buy a new Mac?

Currently, I cannot play. My Mac is just weak.

I'm really attatched to this box though. It's a G3 MT300.

Should I just go ahead and shell out the cash and buy a new Mac, or could/should I upgrade
this so that I CAN play.


I REALLY want to jump into this. In any case, I'll be a board member until I get my machine situation squared away.

My goodness. I really miss that case... but that is one old computer! You'd have far more benifits from an upgrade to a newer model than simply being able to play in SL.

This is unfortunately not an obvious choice.

Which G3 is this? If it's a beige box the system bus is only 66 MHz. If it's a blue-and-white it's got a 100 MHz bus and can be upgraded to the equivalent of a G4 "Yikes!" model. Still not great, though.

The best video card you can put in a G3 is a PCI Radeon 9200 with 128M of VRAM. If you also replace the CPU with an upgrade from someone like Old World Computing, you could potentially push it up to G4/500 or even higher. Let's price this out:

Sonnet Encore G4/500 - $149
ATI Radeon 9200 PCI Mac Edition - $120-$150 - if you can find it.

I had a similar system but I hadn't tried to run SL on it. I doubt it would be happy - it was massively slower for every other graphics program I've run on it than my first generation Mac mini. I wouldn't expect it to be usable even if you threw 5 or 6 hundred into it.

Total: $300.

The PPC Mac mini has a Radeon 9200 with 32M (or 64M) internally, and it's AGP... not PCI. It's significantly faster but the small VRAM and the limited GPU hurts. Its also about as much a dead end as your existing system.

The new Intel mini has a much faster processor, but the GPU is actually much worse at 3d - it needs to use one of the two cores pretty much exclusively to make up for the shortcomings of the video, and is no faster than the original mini in T&L benchmarks.

It *can* play SL, though.

Total: $600+

You'd be much better off with a used eMac, the last generation has a Radeon 9600, which on the Mac is quite acceptable for SL. You can still get them on the Internet for $800 or less.

If you're getting a *new* Mac, you need to get something like the 2 GHz iMac. THe cheapest iMac at $999 has the never-to-be -sufficiently-reviled GMA950 GPU, same as the intel mini. You need the next level up - the $1199 one.

A better solution if you're just interested in playing SL and want to get in on the cheap would be to keep your existing Mac and throw $500 or so into a PC and a KVM switch. keep using your Mac for real work, and treat the PC as a console that plays Second Life... and wait for Apple to get a GPU that really supports OpenGL in a desktop.

That's what I did.

Someone above already assumed you wanted to keep your upgrade cheap. My input: Get a new Mac if you have the cash.

If you have the funds SL runs pretty dang good on a new intel based Mac. With SL running I can still fully multitask (thanks to dual-core processors) and generally function along. Right now I've got a 2.16ghz MacBook Pro, but you should also experience at least as good if not better performance on a higher end Mac or a Mac Pro, plus, since the Mac Pro was just released in august hopefully the upgrade cycle is still a ways off so you don't feel obsolete immediately after dumping the cash. If all goes well you might be able to be the envy of your friends for another 9 months :^).

I think you're at the end of the upgrade cycle. I don't recommend it for reasons of Dollars, performance and future compatibility.
I've loved my 7600 for years...upgraded with a G4/700 card and ram and a vid card..but in the end, it just didn't have the bus speed to run SL...SOooo...
I bought a Mini, wiht LOTS of RAM.
Its been a great upgrade!
And the Mini is a fine fine machine for the Lindens (about 170,000 Lindens at L$280 to the US$)
BUT, my max frame rate is about 5 fps.

I'm already saving up for a bigger/faster mac

If you have small Lindens, the mini is better value than upgrading.
If you have medium Lindens to spend, the iMac is a nice machine (but read the forum posts on display issues...and note that the newer/bigger iMac has an upgradable display card which makes it more desirable than the old closed box)
If you have mucho Lindens, the case in the Mac Pro is just what you want--upgradable for the next decade

Another option... scan eBay or similar for a G5 for sale cheap. You're likely to be between the mac mini and the faster iMac with intel chips, but I still get lovely performance from mine... upgrading is on my cards when I get a better cash flow, but it's not there yet, and I don't actually need it, I'm routinely running on 192m draw and can handle several clients at once fairly happily.

I loved that model when it was new. And used it for a very long time. But there just isn't enough there, even you you got the best and most expensive upgrades on the market for it to run SL.

I currently run on a 17" Core 2 Duo iMac and it is just great. And not too badly priced either. I would stay away from the models that use the Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics, as that really doesn't work at all for SL. Or at least not well enough that you won't be tearing your hair out.

You mean "on a new intel based Mac with an ATI or nVidia video card". The low end models with the Intel GMA950 are a different kettle of lag altogether.

The old PPC mini was a well balanced machine for the time, but the new one... no, it really isn't. It's like they put a small block V8 engine in a VW beetle... by tearing out the back seat to make room...
For the same price as a mini you can get a PC that will run rings around the Mini and easily outpace a Macbook Pro, hook it up to a KVM switch, use it for video games and keep your old Mac for real work.

For the same price as a mini you can get a PC that will run rings around the Mini and easily outpace a Macbook Pro, hook it up to a KVM switch, use it for video games and keep your old Mac for real work.

Thank you all for your kind help.
It is REALLY appreciated.

Iguess I will get a new mac AND a new PC. This is a beige G3 I bought in Japan 8 years ago and I figured it was at the end of its upgrade cycle. The thing is that I've NEVER upgraded it, nor have I ever needed to get it repaired. And I have worn that 9GB hard drive OUT, but it's still ticking over.

I'll keep this thing because dangit, it is STILL a good computer. Maybe I WILL upgrade it and keep it around as a server or something. I love my Mac!

I really cant wait to play this. I'd just found about it from another website and then the next day I see it on CNN. SL is about to explode.

With the Intel Macs you can have OS X and Windows on the same machine. No need to buy 2 different computers.

My beige G3 is living in the closet as a media server btw. Still chugging along just fine.

Much as I love my Mac Mini for everything else, I have to agree that on a tight budget, you're better off spending $300 to $500 and getting a cheap Win XP system and a good video card, and just use it as a console for playing SL on. It will cost you about half of what it costs to get any currently available new Mac that will even come close in terms of SL performance.

Maybe if Apple will start making low and mid-range Macs that have upgradable video cards again, we can slap a better vid card in a cheaper Mac and rock on. But for now, the only new Macs that you can put a good enough video card into are their highest, most spendy models. Most Macs can hack SL just fine in terms of CPU and RAM, but get throttled by a crummy video card choice that can't be upgraded.

The lowest decent new Mac for SL is the $1200 version of the iMac, and even then, that is somewhat questionable.

I'm in the same boat as you with a quicksilver g4 & radeon 8500, I averge 4fps. But I think I will be upgrading my mac unless Apple comes out with something like the 8600 I had way back when.

OK, I've been doing some research and I didn't know abut the software that would let me run Windows at the same time as OSX.(Parallels?).

SO. I won't be getting a PC. I'll be dropping about 6+Gs on a MacPro with the ATI card and getting parallels installed.

I just have to save the money. See you guys in the world in December.

Until then, I'll lurk these forums.

Thanks for ALL the help!!

The two computers aren't to run Windows and OS X. They're to have a computer running OS X and a computer that has some horsepower for SL. To get a Mac with the performance of my $600 AMD-based box I'd have to spend about 2 grand... and it'd run so hot I couldn't use it in the summer.

A Mac mini (even a PPC one) does *everything* I need other than SL. There's no need to spend $2000 when you can get the same result for $1200.

[edit: But if you're gonna spend 6 grand on it, go for the Mac Pro. ]

SL doesn't run in Parallels due to poor video support in Parallels. You'll have to use Boot Camp and boot into WinXP if you want to go that route.

I have to say that I have just today purchased one of the twenty-inch iMacs, with the 256meg graphics card, and apart from being an impressive beast generally it runs SL more than adequately, even whilst having a dozen other applications open, recording video, and so on.

if you have a Mac Pro with 1gb+ ram, any of the processors, and the x1900XT he said he was getting... .why the heck would you want to run SL in Windows? it would run perfectly fine in OSX.

Exactly.