Assembling the Fastest OS 9 Machine

[ClassicHasClass]

An overclocked 1.42 GHz Mirrored drive door will probably be faster than a 7447a because the Apple processor has 2 megs of L3 cache in addition to 256k of L2 cache as compared with 512k of L2 and no L3 cache on the Sonnet processor card. Coupled with the 167 MHz DDR memory bus and ATA/100 bus, I doubt you'd find anything faster.
With regards to disk, I'd say get a fast 1.5 or 2 TB drive with a SATA to IDE adapter. The drives these days are capable of running a real, honest 100 MB/sec, so you're not really going to see anything faster in such a machine.

Did the 1.42s come as FW400? I've only seen the 1.25s as FW400, though I imagine you could just get the 1.42 out of one of the FW800s and bolt it in.

Classilla is built on a 1.25GHz dual G4 MDD. I would have no patience for letting it build on a lesser machine, because even as it is from total utter scratch it takes over 90 minutes worst-case. I have a spare bodydouble for it too; I take no chances.

 

[Bunsen]

An overclocked 1.42 GHz Mirrored drive door will probably be faster than a 7447a because the Apple processor has 2 megs of L3 cache in addition to 256k of L2 cache as compared with 512k of L2 and no L3 cache on the Sonnet processor card. Coupled with the 167 MHz DDR memory bus and ATA/100 bus, I doubt you'd find anything faster.

This sounds like very good advice. Even without overclocking, the much larger cache should give the Apple CPU a fair chance of keeping up with the Sonnet. And it'll be a heck of a lot cheaper.

Also note that the L3 cache is 2MB per processor, not shared.

Note however that the dual 1.42GHz CPU was only shipped in the non-OS 9 booting Firewire 800 MDDs. The fastest OS 9 booting machines were the dual 1.25GHz 2002 FW400 MDD, or the "reissue" 2003 FW400 single 1.25GHz MDD

The June 2003 model is essentially the same as the G4/1.25 GHz dual processor (2002) with a 25% faster system bus / Unlike other 2003 Power Macs, it have the ability to boot into OS 9 /
This model has a 167 MHz system bus / four RAM sockets / ATA/33/66/100

Based on this, my theoretical formula for the fastest OS 9 machine:

• 2003 re-issue FW400 motherboard
  
• Apple dual 1.42 GHz CPU from FW800 machine
  
• overclocking optional

Even if you had to buy two MDDs, swap the CPUs and sell the second machine, that should work out way cheaper than buying a QS or MDD and the Sonnet 2x2GHz.

As to drive choices: How about a Firewire 800 PCI card with FW-SATA or FW-IDE converters? That should be usable in OS 9, right? And software RAIDable?

 

[Unknown_K]

The fastest current PPC system I have is only a B&W with a G4-450 CPU upgrade (needed for a Matrox RTMAC setup I have).

When current, Matrox stated, RTMac was only compatible with an AGP equipped G4 - however, I fitted a G4 500MHz ZIF card into a B&W which worked reasonably well

My setup works fine on that B&W, I have a Radeon video card in the 66mhz PCI slot (the model with the fan before they started naming them 7000 and took out T&L). I should get an early AGP system and move the setup to it someday. High speed G4 ZIF cards are still pricey.

 

[Emehr]

I'm happy with my B&W G3 with maxed out RAM (1 GB), upgraded 1.1 GHz processor (well, it's advertised as 1 GHz but the setting goes to 11, er, I mean 1.1), and OS 9.2.2. I'm more productive in Mac OS 9 since I spend less time bullsh*tting around online. :lol:

 

[Floydy]

My setup works fine on that B&W, I have a Radeon video card in the 66mhz PCI slot (the model with the fan before they started naming them 7000 and took out T&L). I should get an early AGP system and move the setup to it someday. High speed G4 ZIF cards are still pricey.

I have that GPU in the 66MHz slot, but without the fan (DVI & VGA) - it came with a B&W that I collected for free in a Shopping mall car park. It has a ZIP drive too. The G4 500MHz ZIF card was sourced off ebay, someone was selling a Beige G3 with one fitted. I offered to buy the card only and they disposed of the G3 separately, no jumper settings - just plug and play

 

[Floydy]

Did the 1.42s come as FW400? I've only seen the 1.25s as FW400, though I imagine you could just get the 1.42 out of one of the FW800s and bolt it in.

In my case they did - I was surprised to find this to be so when I bought a FW400 1.42 NEW just before the original PM G5 came out. It became faulty 5 years later, so I bought another that had a faulty processor and transferred it over as that one was FW800 only.

Working 1.42's were fetching crazy money on ebay this time last year...

The logic boards are interchangeable as long as they are 167 bus speed...

 

[avw]

The fastest OS 9 booting machines were the dual 1.25GHz 2002 FW400 MDD, or the "reissue" 2003 FW400 single 1.25GHz MDD

What are the exact differences between that two motherboards (except that the 2003 FW400 needs a installed X to boot native into 9)? Everymac.com and others have no answers for me.

The advice to overclock a original Apple 1,42 Ghz seems to be good. I found several pages with exact informations. Should often work up to 1,8 GHz.

About Ram-disk, the Gigabyte i-RAM is availaible for less than Euro 200 including RAM. And that should be a verry well 4GB harddisc for OS 9 and scratch partition! Ever seen a Oldworld machine booting from RAM-disk? That rocks!

 

[ClassicHasClass]

I posted this over at PPCMLA, but since we're talking about it here too, I got one of the Sonnet dual 1.8s (1833MHz 7447A) over the weekend. Not cheap. But it sure is zippy! Virtual PC, for example, runs at a howling pace.

Classilla doesn't build a great deal faster, but admittedly its compilation is largely diskbound and the step processing is driven by Apple Events, which are slow.

With that, this system has a Radeon 9000 Pro, the dual 1.8s, 2GB RAM (1.5GB in OS 9) and of course the 167MHz bus, 2MB L3, etc. So that's definitely a big bruiser for the old OS.

 

[johnklos]

I have a dual 1.8 GHz (1833 MHz) 7447a Sonnet card in an Xserve with 167 MHz bus and 2 gigs - it'll never see OS 9, but it runs OS X very well. It's actually pushed in excess of 500mbps of traffic with 500 Apache daemons, which is much more than I imagined it'd be able to do.

Recently I got a single processor 1.7 GHz (1733 MHz) 7448 for a Quicksilver primarily because of the 1 meg of CPU speed L2 cache (as opposed to 512k in the 7447a), and between that and a fast 1 TB SATA drive on the IDE bus (SATA-IDE adapter), it's noticeably faster at compiling than another 1.8 GHz 7447a system.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Yeah, cache is so important on those G4s because of the system bus. I notice that POWER7 is strongly emphasizing cache as well, which means that as much as things change they stay the same in POWER-land.

 

[MacJunky]

Any high end workstation/server class CPU has lots of cache compared to normal desktop/consumer variants.

Nothing new there.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Sure, and Tukwila is the same way. But Power6 and Power7 both really get starved for data quickly if their caches aren't full, and take a bigger penalty than other architectures in those situations. Look at what TurboCore does to the Power7: it's not just a GHz increase, it takes over even more of the cache since the number of cores in flight is reduced.

IBM is bragging that even the slowest Power7 outpaces a 5GHz Power6, though I imagine that is workload dependent:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/08/ibm_power7_chip_launch/page2.html

 

[Unknown_K]

Any high end workstation/server class CPU has lots of cache compared to normal desktop/consumer variants.Nothing new there.

Anything involving massive processing of large chunks of DATA is helped by cache.

People used to love the old PPro 200's with 1MB of cache at the core CPU speed for database and other data intensive apps.

 

[ppuskari]

I actually still have 4 Compaq 5000 units onlined at the house. Even though they are Quad PPro 200mhz they are all 1meg cache per chip. The memory buss gets saturated before the 4th proc really can be flexed but that was known even way back in 1997 or so.

I run Ubuntu Linux on 2 of them once finally figuring out the correct memmap= line to get them to boot without a kernel panic. The other 2 are running Windows 2000. Been running solid for years now. Keeps the basement warm in the winter too. Today they are my testing vmware farm using vmware server 2.0 under the Ubuntu and Win2k. All of them have the full 4Gig of ram in them and 5 9.3 Gig hd's on the array.

 

[H3NRY]

I presume the 1.5GB RAM limit in OS9 is why my Sawtooth (AGP graphics G4) with 2GB RAM installed shows Built-in Memory 1.99GB; VM Off; Largest Unused Block 1.45GB; and MacOS using 5548MB? The OS just walls off the "extra" 512 MB? Anyhow, it runs.

Specs: 1.2 GHz PLX G4 with 2 MB level 2 cache, which helps with the 100 MHz system buss, 160 GB and 500 GB ATA drives on the internal controller, a pair of 1TB Barracudas on a PCI SATA card, and ATI Radeon 9700. Snappy machine in OS 9.2.2 and OS 10.4.11. With MacOS ROM 9.5.1, it has no trouble with large hard disks. It's my fastest OS 9 machine, beating the Cube which has an NV FX6200 GPU which is a dog under OS 9.

 

[LCGuy]

Yep, you're right - no matter what you do, Mac OS 9 and below simply cannot address any more than 1.5GB of RAM, its a limitation built into the OS, and short of rewriting the Mac OS (which Apple already did with Mac OS X), there's nothing that can be done about it. Like it matters anyway - 1.5GB is heaps, and I do mean heaps for OS 9.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Do the ATI OS 9 drivers properly support the 9700? I thought the 9200 (RV250) was the last card officially supported by ATI for OS 9, but I would be delighted to be wrong.

 

[avw]

Do the ATI OS 9 drivers properly support the 9700? I thought the 9200 (RV250) was the last card officially supported by ATI for OS 9, but I would be delighted to be wrong.

No 3d support anymore. That´s why the G-force is still the fastest OS 9 card in existance.

 

[H3NRY]

I don't know if it is "properly" supported, but it works for me. All resolutions and color depths are available, and 2D seems pretty fast. I don't run 3D games, so I can't say whether that's accelerated or not. The ATI extensions load except there was one I had to trash to get the system to boot. Apple System Profiler reports it as Card Model ATY, R350; Card ROM# 113-A07525-130. It's an AGP Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB flashed for Mac.

 

[avw]

which Apple already did with Mac OS X

You know that´s not true Keith Stattenfield and his team did a lot of work at OS 9 already, until Steve Jobs forced them to abandon it (and never release it) and go on with his former NeXT, ...

X is an improved NeXT but not a improved MacOS!