• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

CPU upgrades for PowerCenter?

EvieSigma

Young ThinkPad Apprentice
I have a Power Computing PowerCenter 150, and I also have an Apple 200MHz 604e CPU card. Could I put the 200MHz card in the PowerCenter, or does it require only PowerComputing CPU cards for some reason? And if it can accept an Apple CPU card, can you freely upgrade from 604 to 604e or am I stuck with only regular 604 cards?

 

jessenator

Well-known member
trag covered this quite nicely in a thread I can't recall... I'll post it here if I find it.

The long and short is that only Power Computing daughter cards can be used, due to some differences between theirs and Apple's CPU cards. I don't know if it would brick it,  but I don't think it's a good idea.

The PowerCenter (and Pro) are the same design as the PowerTower I have, which is to say it's a reference design of the Power Macintosh 7200 / Catalyst design. Just, PCC made it better ;)  I used a couple of different PCC 604 CPU cards and even tried a 604e/225 out of (probably) a PowerTower Pro, and it gave me weird artefacts (like failing an FPU test but still stable). I eventually found a 604e/210 card which was used in the PowerCenter Pro* and it runs like a champ in my PowerTower. In fact, the boards are almost all (save the PowerCenter Pro) screen-printed with PowerCurve on them.

I like this database of *configurations Power Computing had: http://macinfo.de/rechner/clone-powercomputing.html

Here's the section about the architecture: http://macinfo.de/hardware/boards-g2.html#catalyst


EDIT: found it :)  





Or was it this one?




 
Last edited by a moderator:

jessenator

Well-known member
I still have that 604e 225/45 card if you're interested in a speed bump. I know I mentioned that weird FPU (I think it was a Norton test, I don't recall which FPU test, but it was only one of the several of them), but the system ran fine and stable with no issues. Either way, PM me if you're interested.

PCC's Catalyst/PowerCurve boards can run from 40-60 MHz bus speed from what I've gathered. It ran in both my PowerWave and the PowerTower.

 
Last edited by a moderator:

jessenator

Well-known member
Is it a Toshiba? I'm on my 3rd Toshiba-branded drive... I'd recommend finding a later Sony/Apple CD-ROM instead of the originals PCC used.

 

EvieSigma

Young ThinkPad Apprentice
Is it a Toshiba? I'm on my 3rd Toshiba-branded drive... I'd recommend finding a later Sony/Apple CD-ROM instead of the originals PCC used.
Nah, it's a NEC drive! I have an Apple 8x drive that I'll try out first, but if that doesn't work either I have to go shopping.

 

EvieSigma

Young ThinkPad Apprentice
Okay, I've tried the Apple drive jumpered as close as I can be to the original drive and either I'm still wrong or the drive just doesn't work because it won't read discs either.

 

EvieSigma

Young ThinkPad Apprentice
If by that you mean a jumper covering the "Term Power" pins, then yeah. If not...then no, I don't have a hard drive in this system yet or any kind of internal 50pin SCSI terminator.

I couldn't get it to even TRY to boot off a CD so I got tired of it and mothballed it until I decide I want to work on it again.

 
Top