Sonnet Crescendo troubles in 7300/200

[corgski]

I have a Sonnet Crescendo G3/233 that results in a no-chime condition on my 7300, however a factory processor card works fine. I've removed and re-installed the sonnet drivers and still no luck. Am I correct in assuming the sonnet card is probably bad at this point, or did they sometimes require weird fuckery to make work?

 

[jeremywork]

I have a SCSI PCI card that worked fine with both the stock 604ev and a NewerTech G4 in my 9600, but when I installed a Sonnet G4 it wouldn't produce a chime until I removed that SCSI card. If there are any cards onboard you may try removing them to see if that's the hangup...

 

[EvilCapitalist]

Aside from removing any other PCI cards installed as a test, there are a few things to check:

- Did you hit the Cuda reset switch before installing the Sonnet card?  It's located between the ADB port and the CPU slot.

- Have you cleaned the contacts on the Sonnet card?

- Have you blasted the CPU slot with some compressed air?  My 8500 was super finicky with any CPU upgrades to the point that they had to be installed "just so" to work, but a few hits with an air duster and everything worked much better.

 

[jessenator]

- Have you blasted the CPU slot with some compressed air?  My 8500 was super finicky with any CPU upgrades to the point that they had to be installed "just so" to work, but a few hits with an air duster and everything worked much better.

+1 on this point. Same situation with my PowerWave. The daughtercard contacts and slot needs to be darn clean.

 

[corgski]

I'd been pushing the CUDA after swapping the processor cards as that's what the sonnet guide said to do, but I'll try it before. I also ordered some new PRAM batteries because the one on the board right now is from a batch I got that were kinda iffy.  As far as cards go, I tried the swap before installing any PCI cards.

Once I replace the battery I'll also go ham with some isopropanol on the contacts and canned air in the slot because it can't hurt before trying this again.

 

[jessenator]

Haha, I think I just jinxed myself having posted in this thread   I got my Starmax board rigged up so I could see what its specs are and see my L2 Sonnet work and I get a crash on boot. Cleaned it out real well and still nothing.

I found this link: http://www.zone6400.com/hack_crescendo.html Though not specifically for your motherboard architecture, there might be some useful tips in there. One suggestion was to actually downgrade to an older version of the Crescendo driver, or to use the hacked version to alter its order in the extensions load queue. That's what I'm going to do tonight probably.

 

[jessenator]

I installed v 2.3.1 and that seemed to have solved that problem https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/sonnet-crescendoencore-driver

but I at least got to the extensions loading before it crashed previously... any luck with yours, corgski?

 

[Nathan]

No idea if there's any relation, but somebody on Reddit was saying to me that there's some kind of extension to disable speculative execution on the G3.

I doubt that would cause any problems at boot time, but maybe try booting without any extensions (or whatever the absolute minimum possible is)?

 

[jessenator]

some kind of extension to disable speculative execution on the G3.

SOMobjects? That's what 6400zone has listed
 

 

[corgski]

Haven't touched it yet, this weekend I'll probably get around to trying again.  Also I never knew there were upgrades for the 6400 until seeing that link. Once I get my 6400 repaired I might have to work on tracking one of those down too!

 

[jessenator]

6400 repaired I might have to work on tracking one of those down too!

I think Sonnet marketed their cards as "for upgrade-impaired Macintosh models" or something to that effect—plugging into the L2 cache slot. I lucked out with mine. Bought it attached to a Motorola Starmax board—the listing said nothing about it. Netfreak pointed it out in the ebay listings thread and I jumped at that purple heatsink like a duck on bread. 

The 64/6500, 54/5500, Twentieth Anniversary, 4400/7220, Starmax, some Supermac models and PowerComputing PowerBase (might be a few more) all use the L2 G3 sonnet crescendo, which I've come to find out is pretty rare (and a couple of others that are even rarer). and they get gobbled up for TAMs and the like. They easily fetch several hundred on ebay these days. Not letting this one go...

The 6400 can only hit 400MHz, even if you find the 500MHz Sonnet model, because of the bus speed. However, 6400zone posted something about swapping a crystal oscillator to bump it up.

 

[Nathan]

SOMobjects? That's what 6400zone has listed
 

I think they called it ROMFixer? In my case I've got a Power Mac 6100/66 with a Crescendo/Nubus G3 (250/512K). Of course it's a PDS card despite the name.

 

[corgski]

So just to update, I'm still having no luck with this card. I've tried multiple permutations of the cuda button/processor swap, cleaned the card's contacts, put in a brand new PRAM battery, tried re-installing the sonnet drivers over a brand new install of 9.1, removed the factory L2 cache from the cache slot, went down to a single matched pair of RAM, and still nothing.  I even tried it in my parts 7300 (which it worked in back in 2008) just to rule out issues with this logic board. I think at this point I've ruled out everything but pining for the fjords.