B&W G3 Powerlogix no boot

[sircabulon]

I have a powerlogix powerforce g3 and my computer wont boot with it installed. It still boots with the orignal processor. The powerlogix was previously installed into a beige g3 and another B&W, but running bus speeds of 67mhz. Mine is running at the full 100 which is why I want to use this card. as is, I am stuck at 400 which crawls for me. itunes doesnt have smooth playback sometimes. Anyone know how to fix this. I checked all over the powerlogix site and installed with their instructions.

 

[Bunsen]

Is it one of the cards with a dial for speeds rather than a jumper block? If you search for powerforce here you will find a relevant thread.

 

[sircabulon]

it is a powerforce that you adjust the speed using cpu director. the jumper settings arent supposed to matter. This leads me to think that it is an open firmware problem. I tried experimenting with jumper settings. If i clock the 350 mhz down to 266 mhz on a 67 mhz bus it will not boot. However i put a slower processor in, it boots just fine. It has the latest version of firmware.

 

[waynestewart]

With my Beige or B&W before installing CPU Director, they ran at a default speed of about 500mhz (I'm not at home so I can't check the exact number) no matter what the jumpers are set for.

 

[Franklinstein]

Do you have one of the Rev. 1 B&W? Those are reported to have many problems, though most pertain to the UDMA implementation on the primary IDE channel. My Rev. 1 B&W was always problematic, usually locking up at random and other oddities, and recently died completely. I think the final straw was attempting to upgrade to an 800MHz G3. It would never boot from any media again after that, even with the original processor. One of the heatsink retainer clips snapped off eventually (this wasn't the first processor upgrade/swap/replacement), so I just wrote it off as a dead POS. I'll get a Rev. 2 board to replace it and anticipate great success.

 

[sircabulon]

how do i check what revision this is?

 

[Rodus]

^^ Rev 1 or 2

The best way to make sure you're getting a Rev. 2 motherboard is the "402" marking on the CMD646 IDE controller chip

Franklinstein's right, the Rev 1's are horribly twitchy.

 

[Aoresteen]

My B&W gave me fits until I did a firmware update on it. I went from 8.6 to 9.2 to 10.4

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=3841731

The Revision 1 B&W G3 works nicely if you don't try to overdrive the IDE port. I just use a 12GB hard dirve and added a PCI IDE card for additional drives.

Slap a gig of RAM into it.

Good Luck!