Tricking out my Power Macintosh 7600

[BarnacleGrim]

I have come to really enjoy using classic Mac OS again, with my 7600 getting a key role in my photowork flow. And with on board SCSI and serial it's the perfect compatibility machine between old and new. But I'd really like to soup it up, in addition to making the photo workflow smoother, I could use it to play all the games that won't run well in OS X.

The first thing to do is add more RAM, which I did once I got it, transferring two 64 MB DIMMs from my old and not so upgradeable Performa 6400. Troble is, almost all the other slots in the 7600 have their latches broken off for some reason. I can't fit another pair. Maybe I could find replacement slots somewhere?

Then it's the processor. There's a 500 MHz G3 and a 1 GHz G4 from Sonnet. The latter is sold out, I don't know what the chances are of finding one, but 500 MHz is in any case a good improvement on the 132 MHz 604.

It only has 1.2 GB of hard drive space. Should I look for a larger SCSI drive, or is a PCI ATA interface something worth considering?

I guess I should also upgrade the graphics. Something like an ATi Rage 128 PCI, perhaps?

The on-board 10base-T is a bit slow, I have an Asanté 100base-TX installed, but I get a bomb on startup when I have the extension installed. I'll write down the error message.

If I have a remaining slot I guess I could add USB or FireWire, but I doubt I'd have much use for it.

 

[trag]

A PCI ATA or SATA card and a modern hard drive will give you vastly better disk performance than what is available from the built-in SCSI and older hard drives. But don't make the mistake of adding an ATA interface and then installing a very old IDE drive. The platter/media speed on those really old drives couldn't deliver much in the MB/s department. Get a drive which was made no later than 2003 (that's a rule of thumb and will have exceptions).

If you can find one, you might consider a SIIG USB2/Firewire/Gig-enet card. It very economically gets all three functions on one card. Hens teeth now days.

In my mind, the perfect combination for the three PCI slot machines is an Acard 6880M (or 6280M), the aforementioned SIIG card, and some video card, probably a Radeon 7000 or 9200.

There was/is also the 1000MHz PPC750FX based G3 card from PowerLogix for the PCI Macs. I don't know if those are still available. You might be able to fake it with a ZIF Carrier Card and the 1GHz G3 ZIF, which I think is still available.

But really, all that upgrading is only good for fun, and if you can afford it. In terms of simple price/performance, the used G4 machines from Apple are a better value, rather than trying to upgrade a 7600 -- unless you need to run something pre-OS 9.

 

[Unknown_K]

I have a few ATA PCI cards in use on old PCI macs, they are decent even with older HDs (over 20GB, 7200 RPM). Personally I like getting a cheap UWSCSI cards and running a 10K or 15KRPM late model SCSI drive in those machines ( the ones that wont melt down or make too much noise). You can get the SCSI cards cheaper then ATA cards, and those fast SCSI drives are about worthless so they sell for nothing on ebay. For me old Beige macs are more authentic with SCSI, and I don't see the need to spend $$$ for G3/4's faster then 400 or so since you can run OS 9 on cheap G4 towers.

What you do need to look out for is a 7500/8500 loaded up with RAM on ebay selling for nothing (or one parted out) for those hard to find 128MB FPM or EDO DIMMs (also a cheap way of getting the CPU upgrades as well). A few years back I won a 7500 and a massive amount of parts for under $20 (local pickup only). It was a 15 minute drive on the highway but I ended up snagged 5 or so G3 upgrade CPUs, a couple PCI RADEON mac editions, tons of RAM, a few SCSI and ATA cards, stack of original software CDs, external SCSI cdroms, motherboards from 7500/8500/8600 plus power supplies. Filled up my whole trunk.

A Fast HD, plenty of RAM, and a cheap CPU upgrade would make the 7600 fly on System 7/8/9 and not cost that much (unless you are in a hurry).

 

[Bunsen]

There's also the old Sonnet Tempo Trio cards, that give you Firewire, internal IDE/ATA* and USB (1.1 only IIRC) in a single slot.

* two channels, so up to four drives

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Yes, 1.1. But they're good cards nonetheless and very handy.

 

[Unknown_K]

USB 1.1 is all you can use in Classic mac OS anyway.

 

[johnklos]

Even though the memory slots have broken tabs, you can still put DIMMs in the sockets. Unless your 7600 moves all the time, the DIMMs aren't going to go anywhere.

You're probably more likely to find a used 700 or 800 MHz Sonnet G4. Good luck!

 

[Unknown_K]

Those latches pop in don't they?

 

[trag]

There's also the old Sonnet Tempo Trio cards

I've seen an awful lot of buggy reports on those things. But then, I was living on the SuperMacs list back then, so it's probably issues with the Umax S900. Still, Sonnet had detailed trouble reports on *exactly* what was causing the problem. They could have bothered to fix it. Grrrr.

Unfortunately, the tech support guy (Neal?) was too ignorant to understand the problem description.

 

[Bunsen]

I notice they don't sell them for Macs any more.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

I use a TT in my 7300 running NetBSD. The only problem with it is that the kernel keeps thinking it's ATA/33 which is a bit of speed hit, but it works well enough. I *am* running an old kernel, though (but the machine is to be retired in a few months, so no point in upgrading now).

 

[Unknown_K]

My 8500 and 7500's don't get used too much these days. I have a 9600/350 waiting for some AVID cards (hopefully one of these days) to make that useful. I can't complain about my 8500 (my second mac ever purchased in 2001), it served me very well until I got a B&W G3 a few years ago. The 8500 has 700+ MB RAM, G3-400/1M, ATA100 IDE card with 2 HDs and a 40X IDE cdrom, ATI video card and a firewire/usb card.

I do wonder if the early PCI Powermacs will fall into the early PPC Nubus trap of not being cared for by collectors down the road, they were well built and very expandable machines.

 

[johnklos]

I use a TT in my 7300 running NetBSD. The only problem with it is that the kernel keeps thinking it's ATA/33 which is a bit of speed hit, but it works well enough. I *am* running an old kernel, though (but the machine is to be retired in a few months, so no point in upgrading now).

Why is it being retired? They're still good PowerPC machines... Anyhow, I don't think they're fast enough to saturate an ATA/33 bus. My PowerMac 9600 with 1 GHz G4 running NetBSD with an 80 MB/sec ATTO SCSI card peaks at around 40 MB/sec when copying and averages around 20 MB/sec. Another 7600 machine with an ATA/66 card and a 700 MHz G4 only does around 15-16 MB/sec:

wd0 at atabus0 drive 0:

wd0: drive supports 16-sector PIO transfers, LBA48 addressing

wd0: 149 GB, 310101 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 312581808 sectors

wd0: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 6 (Ultra/133)

wd0(acardide0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 4 (Ultra/66) (using DMA)

My 8500 and 7500's don't get used too much these days. I have a 9600/350 waiting for some AVID cards (hopefully one of these days) to make that useful.

Are you looking for ABVB cards?

 

[Unknown_K]

Yea ABVB PCI would be the correct cards for a 9600 AVID setup, do you have a set johnklos?

 

[johnklos]

Yes, I do... I'll have to make sure I've got all of them... I'll check at work tomorrow.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

It's being retired from its current purpose; its functions will be transferred to a new IBM Power7 I'm getting later this year. The 7300 will be turned into a disk imaging workstation, since it can do floppies, SCSI and PATA, and I'll probably put a Sonnet SATA card in it also so it can handle those (it will still run NetBSD).

 

[johnklos]

Power7? Nice! Where can I sign up for one of those?

USB floppies, I assume? Or do you have some secret SWIM code on your machine?

 

[Unknown_K]

Any luck digging up those AVID cards?

 

[ClassicHasClass]

IBM says they'll have the entry level Power 7s out in August. I'm probably in the market for a 710 or a 720.

For floppy imaging, it will be booting into Mac OS