One thing to take notice of is that after pressing the reset switch on the motherboard for the first time with the G3 installed the system may not reboot at all, but instead it may show a flashing question mark or something like that. It is a possibility and has to be mentioned since this happened to me. Not to be afraid though, help is at hand. Just power the system completely down and wait for say half a minute before booting up again. This should do the work and you shouldn’t face any additional problems whatsoever.

The system should look something like the picture below, with the floppy drive and cables installed.

As you can easily notice there is not sufficient space for Air Circulation in there actually and this should be one of the main reasons for the processor to run at high temperatures – usually up to 84 degrees Celsius after a couple of minutes in operation. This doesn’t seem to cause any problems though as this system has been running for days 24/24 without any single lockup that could be attributed to the high temperature situation. After contacting MacTell Technical Support I was actually told that the processor can handle temperatures of up to 100 or just a bit more degrees Celsius –this is also noted in Tech Specs from IBM and Motorola for the PowerPC 750 processor (G3), but during the period of time that I have been working with this particular board the temperature never exceeded the value of 85^oC.

The temperature issue only seems to affect the operation of my MacMagic 3DFX card – the version without the heatsinks- which seems to lock up on anything above 54 MHz (clock speed). The only reliable speeds are achieved below the value of 54 MHz (54 MHz sometimes being just a bit dodgy to use).