Maxing out the 9500

[paws]

Weird that it doesn't show up as anything, though..

 

[Gil]

Dare I do it? I'm thinking of maxing out the RAM in the 9500. OS 9.1 has been a little sluggish, and I would like to assign at least 256 MB RAM to Netscape 7.01. What kind of RAM do I need? Should I even attempt this?

What kind of hardware/software/OS should I use to get the most out of this machine?

Edit: Will Sonnet's Allegro USB and FireWire cards work with a 9500 w/ Crescendo G4 upgrade, even though the requirements state a G3 B&W or Higher? What about the TSATA?

Thanks.

 

[equill]

Take a stroll around—or take a net and trawl around—these forums using 9500 and FPM as your search terms. Even though the 9500 can take 1.5GiB in 128MB FPM (only) DIMM cards, the game is scarcely worth the candle under OS 9. VM (1GiB max) does not coexist well with more than about 930MiB of RAM, and you may need to hive off a persistent RAM Disk to get around the hiccup. Although a G3/400MHz 9500 was my favourite Beige muscle Mac for quite a while, a Kansas 9650/G4/800MHz has usurped its place without raising even a glow, let alone a sweat.

de

 

[Charlieman]

Installing six 128MB DIMMs would be a safe and very effective upgrade. OWC sell these for $18 each and my 9600/G4/450MHz is largely happy with them.

The 9500/9600 and related models can be fussy about which PCI card goes in which slot. Be prepared to perform a lot of card swapping and PMU resets to find a stable combination.

It is only worth maxing a 9500/9600 if you wish to use software that can exploit it. The obvious choices are PhotoShop or video editing, but alternative operating systems such as BeOS or Linux can make it worthwhile too. Mac OS 9.x will fly on it, OS X will be adequate but web browsers may well be swamped by a deluge of CSS and Flash cruft.

 

[Bolle]

if youre going leopard get a GeForce 6200 PCI and falsh it to mac. it supports core image even tho its a PCI card. and youd get a whopping 512MB of VRAM

bad thing is that card wont work with 10.4 i guess. its leo only.

 

[OtakuMegane]

if youre going leopard get a GeForce 6200 PCI and falsh it to mac. it supports core image even tho its a PCI card. and youd get a whopping 512MB of VRAM
bad thing is that card wont work with 10.4 i guess. its leo only.

They got those Nvidia cards working in Old World? When I last checked all that, some could be flashed for Mac but due to the way the hardware works it won't function in the pre-G3 systems.

 

[Bolle]

oh :O

dunno then. heard of them to work in G3s so i guessed its ok for the older PCI macs as well. :|

 

[wood_e]

A flashed Radeon might be a good choice - thoughts?

 

[Bolle]

and does the GeForce 5200 PCI work in old world then? would still give you core image if youre lucky :|

 

[OtakuMegane]

and does the GeForce 5200 PCI work in old world then? would still give you core image if youre lucky :|

Not that I know of. You can look up the details on Strangedogs plus almost anything else you'd want to know about flashing.

From what I can recall, something about how the Nvidia cards interface with the system isn't compatible with old world. They'll be fine in a B&W G3 but anything older isn't going to go. I haven't kept up for almost a year now so it's possible they've worked something out. You'd have to dig through the boards.

The Radeon 9200 should be plenty for a 9500/9600 though. Remember that write speeds through the PCI bus (data sent to the video card) are capped at about 40MB/s due to the controller limitations so even a 9200 is probably twiddling its thumbs half the time, no matter how fast the CPU is.