Product Reviews

The Sweet Multiport from GeeThree is a neat solution to a perennial problem. If your Power Mac is under your desk, plugging in peripherals means getting down on your knees. Its Sweet Multiport uses the spare external drive bay on the Power Mac G3 or G4 to provide two FireWire and one USB port and a five-in-one media card reader.

The second part of the package is a PCI card that adds two USB and three FireWire ports. The front-mounted FireWire port will be of particular interest if you have a digital video camera, and the card reader is excellent for digital camera users.

Sweet Multiport will work with any blue and white Power Mac G3 and any Power Mac G4. However, the kit for the Quicksilver G4 range only has a card reader for Compact Flash and Microdrive, because the spare external drive bay on these machines

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is smaller than in other towers.

Installation is fiddly and you'll need to be fairly confident about rooting around inside your Mac. Installing the PCI card won't be a problem for most, but the front section has to be screwed into the drive bay and the drive bay door replaced with the supplied cover. Follow the instructions and you should be fine. However, you have to connect one of the FireWire ports and one of the USB ports on your Mac to a FireWire port and USB port on the Multiport PCI card. This reduces the number of slots available and is strange given that you can transfer both power and data via the PCI bus.

Once everything is installed you can use the extra ports as you would any other USB or FireWire port. We found the ability to connect a digital video camera to the front of our G4 particularly handy. But perhaps most convenient is the card reader. There are plenty of USB card readers that will read the six most popular formats, but they connect via USB. Having one effectively built into your Mac reduces clutter and makes digital camera media more useful.

We like the idea of the Sweet Multiport. In some ways its execution is neat. But in others, like the way it connects to FireWire and USB on the back of the Mac, it's clumsy. However, the sheer convenience of having ports and a card reader on the front of your Mac outweighs these concerns and earns it a recommendation.