Anyone with a 9600 willing to test something?

[Syntho]

It's been nearly three weeks that I've been screwing around with this. There's a freezing issue on my 9600 when I've 1) got -any- CPU upgrade in the machine and 2) have a MOTU PCI soundcard in a PCI slot. Actually, having the hardware in the system is fine, it's the extension conflicts between them that's crashing it. I can have either the CPU extension or the MOTU Audio extension running, but not both at the same time.

I've read reports of this setup working fine on a 9600 so my only guess is that I'm using an older 9600/200mhz model motherboard. I'm unsure though... how do I check?

If someone has a 9600 that's different from mine and is willing to help me out, I'll send you some hardware to try out in your 9600 to see if you can replicate the results. I can't even buy a 9600 if I tried right now, there aren't any for sale.

 

[noidentity]

I use a Sonnet 400MHz G3 card in my 8500 and there is some mention of an option to disable speculative I/O because some things conflict (the Sonnet has an NVRAM patch to work around ROM incompatibility). I seem to remember either their CPU control app or one of the other card's allowing disabling speculative I/O on-the-fly. If you haven't tried, you might disable it manually on startup and see if the instability was caused by that. Of course if this sound card's driver was updated to work with G3 Macs, it should work with older ones as well with G3/G4 accelerators.

 

[Syntho]

There was something called G3 Cache Profiler that I used to disable Speculative Addressing I think it was called, it didn't work. I've tried a Sonnet 500/250/1M and a NewerTech 300/200/1M and both give me the same problem.

There's a Sonnet CPU control app? The only thing that got installed as far as stuff you can actually launch is the Metronome thing. The other items that are installed are extensions. As far as NewerTech, I tried fooling with their MaxPowr control panel, turning down the Cache speed and so on but none of that helped either.

The sound card is a MOTU 324 PCI card. The latest drivers I tried are for OS9 and they were definitely updated for G3 compatibility.

Basically, all CPU upgrades work, and the MOTU 324 works... just not when used together. I read about someone else having a NewerTech 400/200 G3 inside a 9600 with a MOTU 324, so I'm wondering if he had a newer 9600 motherboard. That's my only guess at this point. I tried everything else.

 

[feeef]

Hi Syntho,

I have noticed that the PCI slots on my 9500 don't behave the same way. My SATA card would work much better on the 3 lower slots than on the 3 higher slots.

Have you tried to move your PCI card to another slot? It may help...

 

[Syntho]

I tried moving it, doesn't help. Like I said though, everything works 100%. Just not together or simultaneously.

It's got to be some weird, weird extension conflict. I've heard of this working on other 9600s though, so maybe it's that my 9600 motherboard is old. I'd like to see if someone has a newer one like a 300 or 350 do some tests for me.

 

[noidentity]

Gauge Pro 1.1 is the one I had saved and used most often to monitor my Sonnet card. I only have Sheepshaver (emulator) running at the moment so I can't fire it up to see whether it had a way to disable speculative execution as I remember.

 

[Syntho]

Which model 9600 do you have? Mine is a 200.

 

[Syntho]

I think I got it!

I tried everything in the NewerTech Maxpowr control panel to no avail, but the one thing I skipped over in it was the motherboard's own L2 cache. I believe it's soldered in on a 9600/200. The settings I set the L2 onboard cache to were Off, and Off if CPU's cache is bigger (or something like that).

I didn't know what the effect would be of turning back on the motherboard's L2 cache but I did it anyway, and what do you know... the NewerTech extension and the MOTU extension play along together now. I guess this means that the MOTU extension is expecting to see some motherboard L2 cache and when it doesn't see it it freaks out.

That's funny because I have some other MOTU software that won't work unless I have a physical SCSI drive attached to my 9600, IDE or SATA alone won't work. That same software works on G3s/G4s that didn't come with SCSI however, so I guess if the Mac was originally built with SCSI, the MOTU software knows it and it won't work without it.

I wonder if the same thing applies here but to the L2 cache on the motherboard itself. Both the Sonnet and NewerTech software seemed to turn it off.

 

[Byrd]

Good to hear it works, I recall you can permanently disable the 9600's motherboard cache by removing a jumper - Google around for that one.

 

[Syntho]

http://www.qbjnet.com/9500-9600l2cachedisable_files/resistor-31.jpg

Looks like I've got some soldering to do.

 

[Syntho]

I could just buy a 9600 with a Kansas board in it but 9600s are slightly difficult to come by lately.

 

[gocarlo]

I have a 9600/350 that I was planning to sell soon. PM me if you're interested.

 

[Syntho]

Sent you a PM yesterday

 

[Quadraman]

Unfortunately, my only Kansas machine is a 8600/250, so no PCI conflicts to worry about there. I do have a 9500, but it's not upgraded and opening that case is too much of a pain to bother with. Does anyone know if a 9500 motherboard will work in a 9600 case? Physically, they look identical to me.  

 

[Syntho]

I think I'm gonna bug gocarlo about buying his Kansas 9600. If that doesn't work out I'm still curious about sorting the issue out, but let's see if I can convince him to sell me his first

 

[Syntho]

It looks like I'm going to be dry for a 300/350 machine. I kind of want to try unsoldering the jumper on the motherboard but I'm hesitant. When I disable the onboard cache using the NewerTech MaxPowr control panel there are freezing issues. When I turn it on, it works fine. A possible scenario is that the 9600 freezes because it's disabled, but it still SEES it, because it's 'there'.

If that's the case, removing the jumper should probably be fine. However if that's not the case and I remove that jumper, that means I won't have a working system until I solder the jumper back on.

I'd rather just get a Kansas to be safe but these are really hard to find lately.

 

[trag]

Unfortunately, my only Kansas machine is a 8600/250, so no PCI conflicts to worry about there. I do have a 9500, but it's not upgraded and opening that case is too much of a pain to bother with. Does anyone know if a 9500 motherboard will work in a 9600 case? Physically, they look identical to me.

IIRC, the logic board will fit, but the power supply connectors are different, unless you move the power supply with the logic board.