Quadra 950 - Power Tower

[IIfx]

After many years of delays on my part, I finally managed to get this specific Quadra 950. Many thanks to @Trash80toHP_Mini for taking a large detour on the way home to North Carolina through the countryside of Northern Virginia to hand it off to me. The Quadra fired right up without a single issue after just a little bit of light cleaning.

Specifications:

16mb RAM, with all SIMM slots filled

500mb HDD

No Nubus cards at the moment

My plan for this machine is simple. Stuff it full of Nubus cards and RAM. This Q950 will be the successor to my Q800, which currently has gone through two logic boards after an awful overclocking experiment using a MacClip. The goal is to have a power tower equivalent in awesomeness to my IIfx. That means this Q950 will house at least 1 StageII Radius Rocket, in order to elevate it's grandeur. With a 305w power supply, why not? I bought a SCSI2SD v5.1 board to serve as the main storage for the machine. Perhaps down the road I can locate an OrangePC card to go in it too.

For now, my main goals will be buying RAM for it to get to at least 128mb and setting up the SCSI2SD.

I will post more in this thread as progress is made.

 

[Unknown_K]

Nice machine, so many ways to go with it.

Never seen the logic of popping an 040 Radius Rocket into an 040/33 equipped machines. I suggest finding the 68040/50 (with cache preferred) CPU upgrade or a Daystar PPC PDS card.

You can use an internal CDROM or removable media drive in the front bay and buy 2 more metal mounting sleds for internal drives.

Lots of Nubus video, SCSI. Audio, PC Card, DSP options for the other slots.

 

[IIfx]

Never seen the logic of popping an 040 Radius Rocket into an 040/33 equipped machines. I suggest finding the 68040/50 (with cache preferred) CPU upgrade or a Daystar PPC PDS card.

You can use an internal CDROM or removable media drive in the front bay and buy 2 more metal mounting sleds for internal drives.

Lots of Nubus video, SCSI. Audio, PC Card, DSP options for the other slots.

I agree with you about the Rocket if it’s an original Stage I 25 or 33mhz card. Those are much better used as system accelerators in older 030 Macs. Reason I think the StageII is a better fit in a fast Mac is because it cannot serve as an overall system accelerator. A slow base system paired with a StageII board isn’t fun, the video response becomes very slow unless your card supports block transfer with the Rocket over the Nubus.

I will be looking into the 3d printed bezels for the 950 so that I can add an internal CD. I haven’t seen anyone 3d print the HDD sled yet, although that might not be doable because it is a stamped metal part.

Re Nubus cards I need to go through and figure out what cards I want to stay in the IIfx, and what cards should go in the Q950. I’m thinking to move the Spigot out of the IIfx. While a IIfx is a fast system, it doesn’t really hold a candle to an 040 machine. A 33mhz 040 will do better with basic video than the 40mhz 030.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Never seen the logic of popping an 040 Radius Rocket into an 040/33 equipped machines. I suggest finding the 68040/50 (with cache preferred) CPU upgrade or a Daystar PPC PDS card.

Indeed, but in in many ways it makes sense to go with the Stage II, which operates only under RocketShare along with any of the upgrades you mention.

With a 40MHz 68040, memory on its much faster 40MHz bus and full blown Fast/Narrow SCSI II 40MHz tightly integrated Daughtercard, I dare anyone to benchmark a Stage II Rocket against any Quadra, even the 40/40/DSP 840AV. Stage II Rockets were specifically intended to work in groups, multitasking graphics related tasks like Photoshop filters or RIP tasks in clusters.

So it's really an Apples and Oranges comparison you're making when it comes to the Stage II Rocket, with the Orange outpacing the Apple even in the case of a head to head competition with the 840AV. The Stage II was an either or stock config, the minimum system was really one each of the DSP/SCSI II accelerators on a pair of Stage IIs.

Nobody would have intentionally bought a bare Stage II as a Quadra accelerator without one of the two "relatively" inexpensive accelerators as I bought my 33MHz Rocket without as a IIx launchpad/Quadra. I fully intended to get the SCSI II card at purchase time, but 32MB of interleaved memory was a far more efficient, if far more expensive upgrade for the CPU/FPU intensive tasks at hand. Thanks to IIfx, I finally have the SCSI II Daughtercard, well over twenty years later and a second Rocket/33. Very happy on this side of the trade. :approve:

Dunno about Photoshop on DSP accelerator processing on a single Stage II against an 840AV, that would be truly interesting in terms of benchmarking. I wonder if the AppleTalk over NuBus bottleneck might slow down a single Rocket/standalone NuBus PhotoBooster with the SCSI II Accelerator on board a single Stage II. As I understand it, scratch disk performance is a consideration, very curious about that.

It's hard for me to imagine an 840AV coming out ahead by much at all, if at all against a fully configured Stage II Rocket operating outside its multiprocessing element. In a 950, fuggedaboudit!

Maxing the OS out on a PPC PDS card in the Q950 with the Radius Quadra operating under its System 7.1P max would make for a very entertaining playtoy.

Rockets became niche products the day Apple purposely borked AppleTalk over NuBus to shut them down, much as they later did to Radius and the other Clone mfrs. with the OS 7 to 8 licensing barrier ploy even before SJ shut them down entirely.

Back on topic:

Glad to see your Quadra era MonsterMac was finally handed off safely, operating as was when packed up, lo these many moons ago! Especially happy to see that the bezels transitioned back from their armor plated nook and onto the glacis of that tank without incident. []

Have you got a standalone PhotoBooster to set a Single Stage II/SCSI Accelerator up in a one hand tied behind its back config against a Quadra 840AV? If not, I can send one your way for the showdown should any 840AV jockey dare to take up the Stage II Rocket's gauntlet.  [}]

 

[Byrd]

Never seen the logic of popping an 040 Radius Rocket into an 040/33 equipped machines. I suggest finding the 68040/50 (with cache preferred) CPU upgrade or a Daystar PPC PDS card

I'm trialling just this at the moment (in other words - I've shoved it in the case but am yet to get the software working), a Radius Rocket I 33Mhz card in a IIfx; the Rocket has 128MB RAM, and coupled with a Radius graphics card I'm hoping it will provide a good performance boost.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Depending on tasking, it should be a significant improvement, if not as spectacular on your IIfx as was my IIx upgrade. I bought RocketShare for Rocket 33 in IIx, but it wasn't really worth "sharing" while your IIfx board would be well worth sharing. I went back to RocketWare.

Dedicate your Radius graphics card to the Rocket and a second graphics card to the IIfx under RocketShare after you finish your RocketWare Acceleration testing. You'll have a 7.1P max Quadra desktop and up to a 7.6.1 Mac II desktop up on two monitors running two apps independently or a single app in co-processing mode.  []  

I'm curious about the "fast" SCSI bus on 950, 840AV and x100 series NuBus Architecture PowerMacs and its relationship to a full on Fast/Narrow SCS-2 implementation. What's the SCSI throughput of Apple's boards?

 

[Unknown_K]

The Mac II (68020) was meant for a Radius Rocket or a Daystar 040 if you have the adapter. My 2 Rockets were installed into IIx machines when I snagged them (should have snagged the ugly IIx's also instead of leaving them to get scrapped).

SCSI on Quadras is just OK, on earlier machines it sucks. Most of my 040's have either a Jackhammer or SE IV card in them. I have 3 or 4 Silicon Express II's that I will use on my IIx machines when I get around to it.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

PowerCache 030 was a serious kick in the pants for the main development line of the Mac II series. IIfx was wicked fast bit of deviant Black Box Magic wedged into the IIci/IIsi gap.

Quadra 950 is an upgrade beast of a thing with five slots and fairly capable, if 2MB VRAM limited PseudoSlot video implementation in lieu of the Mac II series' sixth slot for NuBus grapnics.

Stock 950 under whatever OS on one monitor for gaming and a proper, Radius 3MB VidCard driving a 21" res display off the Stage II under 7.1P for much else would be a thing to behold.

Heck, even the Rocket 33 would be hella cool in my 950 under RocketShare with the Little Red Pixel Rocket and PhotoBooster on board.

 

[IIfx]

Making some progress! I configured the SCSI2SD using my Windows box, set it up as a " Seagate" "          ST225N" to fool the Apple HD SC setup. 16gb Class 6 SD card from SanDisk is the media of choice for this project. Right now I am initializing the disk using the System 7.5.3 Disk Tools floppy. It's been verifying for a few hours. Hopefully it finishes soon but I have my doubts. My mounting solution for the SCSI2SD is a bit interesting. I made use of the anti-static bag it came with, along with the built in Q950 velcro cable ties. It's better than just shoving it into the Q950. Also got over the hump of initial Nubus card selection. I moved the Rocket Stage II/SCSI-2, Radius Photobooster, and SuperMac Spigot out of the IIfx and into the Q950. In the place of the Stage II/SCSI-2 I placed my Stage II/Photobooster in the IIfx. The Spigot isn't very useful in the IIfx due to performance limitations of the CPU. The Spigot also didn't play very nicely with the Audiomedia II card.

Until OWC sends me the RAM I ordered the Rocket has more memory than the host.

 

[Unknown_K]

Does the spigot with OS 7.5x and later?

 

[IIfx]

7.5.3 is a temporary launchpad OS. It's the only floppy set I have that has the system enabler for the 950 built in. Once I get network access rolling I will make valid 7.1.1 Pro disks for the machine. My backup images of my 7.1.1 Pro disk set are on my G4.

 

[Unknown_K]

http://radius.vintagebox.de/RadiusQA/Spigot_all.html

The original spigot does not work in OS 7.5.x and needs Quicktime 1.0 to function (QT 1.5 with a beta driver).

So you are kind of limited with OS.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Isn't Radius' VideoVision Studio a much better video/sound capture card than the Spigots?

 

[Unknown_K]

VideoVision is better then the Spigots by far and somewhat similar to Supermac DigitalFilm.

Videovision Telecast is much better then the base Videovision card, but the top end Nubus editing cards (outside of a high end AVID setup) would be the Media 100 and Targa 2000.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

That's what I was thinking. Didn't know Telecast was available for NuBus. Found an interesting tidbit on getting the best out of VVS:

Q: How do I achieve broadcast quality with VideoVision Studio?

A: Although VideoVision Studio does 60 fields, the image quality is sharp, the video signal coming from the external patch panel does not meet the RS-170a specification for broadcast signal. What many production firms have done to achieve a broadcast ready signal is use the Component RGB Cable kit (part 637-0006-01) and use the RGB signal from the VideoVision monitor port to run into an NTSC/PAL scan converter that translates the RGB signal into a RS-170a broadcast ready signal. Also, Sony makes a Betacam SP deck, model UVW-1400, that can take the RGB signal from VideoVision directly and write it to BetaSP tape.

I've got the Spigot for LC, but for NuBus it's Radius VVS or nothing for my Radius 81/110. or the pet IIfx.

 

[IIfx]

I have a VideoVision Studio board, but it's in my Radius 81/110. The card is better paired with a fast PowerPC chip, at least from my tests. I've been using the VideoVision Studio to archive family mini VHS tapes to digital. Only roadblock is the small 2gb HDD and slow 10baseT lan of the 81/110.

 

[Unknown_K]

Yes there is a second card that connects to the telecast breakout box for the Nubus Videovision, I have it.

For spigots I have the original Spigot for Nubus and for LC PDS, then the SpigotProAV for the 840AV. I also have the Supermac Digital Film installed in a IIci with Daystar 040.

My Radius 81/110 has a Media 100 Setup. My Targa 2000 Nubus isn't installed in anything at the moment. My Targa Nuvista is in one of my IIfx I think. Early AVID systems used a modified Nuvista board while later ones used a modified Targa 2000 board plsu special DSP cards. I have a couple AVID setups for Nubus and PCI.

People also forget about the Rasterops video editing cards like the Movie Pak 1 and 2 (bolt on module that fits on specific A/V Rasterops video cards and comparable to the original Videovision.

 

[IIfx]

Today I worked quite a bit on the Q950. Found my spare tray load AppleCD 300, as well as a 4 pin square to 4 pin molex cable out of a long dead 7100 desktop. Reinstalled System 7.1.1 Pro and installed System 7.6 on a 2nd partition. It took a very long time to get my Stage II Rocket working in 7.1.1 Pro because of a corrupt default Rocket startup disk image. Once I made my own using the clean copy of 7.1.1 Pro the random Rocket crashing went away. Performance of a Rocket with the Q950 onboard video is ok. It isn't as fast as when paired with a higher end Radius display card, but it's acceptable. I am kind of surprised that the fast  host CPU fed onboard frame buffer lags behind a Nubus card in RocketShare video performance. Performance of the onboard video with the host OS is snappy.

Note that my comparison of Rocketshare performance is based on my experience with the IIfx and a Radius "red" 24 bit short display card with crippled Apple ROM.

The V5.1 SCSI2SD is fast enough. It isn't blazing fast and falls short of saturating the bus of the Q950, but it is more responsive than a typical HDD in terms of seek times. If your going to do heavy read/write I would strongly recommend getting the v6 for an 040 Mac. The v5.1 should be enough to saturate the SCSI bus of even the fastest 030 Macs. Getting a v6 is on my wish list.

Next I am thinking to install System 8.1 on a third partition. I have 9 partitions due to chopping up the 16gb SD card for HFS, so might as well do something with them. I was thinking 1 2gb partition for documents, applications, and games each, with the rest left as different versions of the system. Still waiting on the RAM and PRAM battery from OWC.

 

[Unknown_K]

What speeds are you getting on the built in 950 SCSI bus?