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Assembling the Fastest OS 9 Machine

MacJunky

Well-known member
As far as I know Macs never got the 9700 and the ones flashed were flashed with modded 9800 ROMs. Macs did get the 9600 but it did not go well with OS 9 either.

 

ClassicHasClass

Well-known member
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.
That's what I thought. Too bad, an RV3x0 card would have been nice.

 

Tron

Active member
ClassicHasClass said:

" 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. "

I'm very intereted in to know how much speedy is your MDD whith Sonnet 1833MHz 7447A than my MDD single overclocked to 1.667Mhz.

Can you put please your Cinebench 2003 test results?

Thats mine G4 MDD 1.667Ghz Single:

Cinebench 2003

Rendering 1 CPU 154

Rendering 2 CPU ----

C4D Shading 189

OpenGl SW-L 498

OpenGl HW-L 486

Thanks.

Sorry for my English.

 

ClassicHasClass

Well-known member
A cursory search for Cinebench 2003 was unsuccessful. Do you have a link? It has to be OS 9, because this machine obviously no longer has OS X.

 

ClassicHasClass

Well-known member
Just downloaded it. StuffIt Expander gave me a funny error about "unable to verify resource fork of Cinebench 2003" and when I started it, it bombed to MacsBug with an illegal instruction. :O The archive doesn't *seem* corrupt and the resource fork looks okay, but it definitely won't run on this machine. Do you have another one you want to try to compare against?

edit: Actually, now that I examine it, it does look like a corrupt archive ... maybe binhex it as a safety measure?

 

CJ_Miller

Well-known member
Hi all - I have been away for a couple of years, but am back at my old Mac antics.

Last week I bought what looks like the fastest PowerBook, a 1GHz Titanium. These machines appear to be finicky but this one looks quite good. It was cheapish. Only problem was that the audio out doesn't work at all. That kind of sucks because I mostly do audio and video work. I figured it wasn't too bad, since I like my quiet firewire audio interface. Then I was horrified to discover that firewire didn't work either... I actually got it running by scrubbing the logic board with 90% isopropyl alcohol and letting it dry. Still no onboard audio but now the firewire works. Going to max the RAM. I replaced the 60 GB stock drive which was noisy and very slow with a 160 GB Seagate which is silent and quite fast. When I can afford a second 1 GHz TiBook I am going to try to fix the audio on here - I suspect it's the output opamps.

My main machine for years has been my MDD G4. I bought a partial MDD, and a partial 1.42 GHz FW800 machine and combined them with the 167 MHz FW400 logic board. Has anybody used XServe CPUs in these? I have heard that they are somehow based on the MDD logic board. 1.33 GHz XServe CPUs seem to be cheaper and easier to find than the 1.42. It's got 1.75GB of RAM, GeForce Ti 4600, and Stealth serial port. It is decent in MacOS 10.4.11 but screams in 9.2.2. A few things to look out for: it is picky what version of the 9.2.2 system it uses. It needs one of the later 2002-2003 versions which were distributed with macs on the gray discs. This means it needs an OS X install first and then browse to the hidden cd folder "images", I think it's called classicbasic or some such thing. Also, these machines run damn hot. They have noisy fans which annoy, and they run hot besides. Mine averaged around 140-160 degrees Fahrenheit! It ran flawlessly for about five years, but then I put it away for a couple of months, and once I brought it out again it just kernel panics (X) or hangs (9). It broke from lack of use? Seems to have a serious bus problem now.

Consider that there is the fastest an OS 9 mac can be, and the fastest an OS 9 mac can be without needing special version of the OS and drivers. For instance, an MDD, eMac, or TiBook DVI won't run with a regular retail version of 9. It might require some fiddling and be slightly less convenient than running the next fastest, probably a Quicksilver.

Off to try to fix my MDD...

 

ClassicHasClass

Well-known member
Sorry for the lag, I was away from my workstations this weekend. The second image you posted, Tron, works fine. Here are the numbers:

CINEBENCH 2003 v1

****************************************************

Tester : CHC

Processor : G4 7447A

MHz : 1833

Number of CPUs : 2

Operating System : OS 9.2.2

Graphics Card : Radeon 9000 Pro 128MB

Resolution : 1920x1080

Color Depth : Millions

****************************************************

Rendering (Single CPU): 163 CB-CPU

Rendering (Multiple CPU): 309 CB-CPU

Multiprocessor Speedup: 1.89

Shading (CINEMA 4D) : 181 CB-GFX

Shading (OpenGL Software Lighting) : 473 CB-GFX

Shading (OpenGL Hardware Lighting) : 474 CB-GFX

OpenGL Speedup: 2.62

****************************************************

It's interesting that the Shading was a hair slower. However, the rendering results are what I would have expected for a small bump in MHz (1667 -> 1833) with everything else being equal (MDD architecture and bus). What graphics card is in your overclocked MDD?

 

Tron

Active member
ClassicHasClass said:

"

What graphics card is in your overclocked MDD?



A standar Mac Radeon 9000 Pro 64 Mb.

ClassicHasClass said:

“... It's interesting that the Shading was a hair slower...”

The test results may have some vary from once to another try.

This is what I obteined for several trials:

Cinebench 2003 Min Max

Rendering 1 CPU 154 157

Rendering 2 CPU -- --

C4D Shading 188 190

OpenGl SW-L 498 503

OpenGl HW-L 486 510

This are my graphics card related extensions and his version numbers:

ATI 8500 3D Accelerator v 7.0.9

ATI Graphics Accelerator v5.6.9

ATI Resource Manager v3.2.1

ATI Video Accelerator v4.8.7

QuickDraw™ 3D RAVE 1.8.1

OpenGLEngine v1.2.4

OpenGLLibrary v1.2.5

OpenGLMemory v1.2.4

OpenGLRenderer v1.2.4

OpenGLUtility v v1.2.4

OpenGLRendererATI v1.3.5

But I think this may be a CPU related cuestion.

By the way we already know two things:

- The Os 9 uses the second processor of the sonnet MDX dual the same way it uses other dual CPU cards.

- And the faster Os 9 machine is the MDD whith sonnet MDX 1.8 Ghz.

We just need to know if a Quicksilver whith MAXPower® G4/7448 dual 1.8 or single 2.0 will perform better.

Sorry for my bad English.

 

ClassicHasClass

Well-known member
Interesting that the Shading numbers vary that much from run to run. I'll run it a few more times when I get a spare moment.

 
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