Replacing the Power PC 604e-based Power Macintosh 8600 minitower, the Power Macintosh G3’s PowerPC G3 processor utilized a fast 512k backside cache to best the competing Pentium II processors in most benchmarks. It was available in a minitower or desktop configuration. The “Beige” Power Macintosh G3 would be the last of the “old world” Power Macs before being replaced by the colorful “Blue & White” Power Mac G3 in 1999.

The minitower version features internal IDE and SCSI busses and three PCI slots. Standard configurations included a 233 MHz G3 processor, 32MB PC 66 RAM, 4 GB IDE hard disk drive, CD-ROM, ATI 3D Rage Pro video card and 10 base-T ethernet. Advanced configurations included a 266 MHz G3 processor, 64 MB PC 66 RAM, 6GB IDE hard disk drive and options for a “Wings” A/V Personality card, ultra wide SCSI drives or 10/100 Base-T ethernet.

This Power Macintosh G3 minitower was bought from university surplus. It features a 266 MHz G3 Processor, 256MB RAM, 30 GB hard disk drive, Zip 100 drive, CD-ROM and the “Wings” Personality card. It boots into Mac OS 8.1.

Shown with it is the original 15” Apple Studio Display LCD monitor. Although it was released at the same time and designed to be used with the “Beige” G3, it was a completely different color palette. It features a standard Macintosh 15-pin video connector, integrated ADB ports and composite and S-Video input ports.