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The GeForce 4MX is an example of dishonest marketing: the GPU is basically a warmed-over GF2MX and doesn't have any of the features of the true GF4. Find a GF4 Ti 4200 or 4600 instead if you want to play games. I've never seen a Creative card work in Classic Mac OS. I have seen some...

It's a Digital Audio/Video (DAV) connector. It's to directly feed signals to an add-in card such as a hardware MPEG codec. I'm pretty sure the TV Tuner card feeds into the logic board via the main harness connector. I can't help with the NatSemi ethernet card. It may have support built into...

As far as thermal paste goes, I definitely second checking it. One time I pulled the heat sink out of a NuBus Power Mac (I think it was an 8115 but maybe a 7100) and not only was the thermal paste dried out, from the factory it was applied off-center so only half of the CPU die actually had...

Yeah one day when I'm better at smd soldering I'll go back to it. IBM made some of their 603es in the very pretty blue epoxy package (which is what this chip is) so I'd definitely like to save it.

I wanted to transplant a 120MHz 603e into a 100MHz 5300 but i botched it pretty good. Not sure if it's salvageable but maybe one day I'll take another crack at it. I went with a 120MHz part because a. it was available (from a ruined 52/53xx board) and 2. I figure I could pair it with a 40MHz bus...

Now that's something I can get behind. If you need a starting point, one of the Interware Booster cards was designed with 060 in mind but it only ever had an 040 in it. As I'm sure you know (but others may not), 68k chips aren't always 100% backward compatible in hardware. Notably, with the...

The whole "PR" thing was a mess. Sometimes it was easy to work out the actual speed of the silicon (a 'PR150'chip would have a '50MHz x 2.5' BIOS/jumper block setting on the chip, for example), other times it was obscured and you had to go digging (as with AMD's Athlon line marketed as "3500+"...

The limit with the Alchemy systems was purely physical: there was only room for 2 cards in the space available. The 4400 is Tanzania which is similar to Gazelle. The presence of the onboard ATI video card has no bearing on the number of slots you can cram into a system. The clone versions of...

While the MFM floppy subsystem was intended for PReP compatibility, I don't think any Mac OS-compatible systems ever shipped with an MFM drive (the RS/6000s and Motorola Powerstacks were PPC with MFM drives but never ran Mac OS). Also the MFM controller chip is missing from the Gossamer board...

I had a 9600 power supply (also a Delta unit) that blew an IC after an inrush current killed it. I'm pretty sure it was in a TO-220 package so it looked like a MOSFET or Schottky diode but it was some sort of VRM or other power control IC. It had failed but it wasn't obvious (the fuse was OK...

Just some notes based on some stuff in this thread: The 740 was intended to be a mostly pin compatible replacement for the 603 and 603. I say "mostly" because some signals go from read-only to bi-directional (or vice-versa) and some voltages can differ, so unfortunately it's not a perfect...

Memory was such a pain in this era. 3.3V or 5V? Buffered or unbuffered? Single or dual bank? EDO or FPM? And that's not even getting into the RISC workstation and server weirdness or application-specific laptop form factors. I'm glad these days it's pretty much all a minor variation of the same...

Out of a PowerBook 540c with a Toshiba screen. Seriously, even in 1994 you weren't going to be able to just go get one at Radio Shack or whatever. They're application-specific and over 30 years old at this point. I haven't seen any Kickstarters to make new ones yet. Your only option is...

My only real point in mentioning the TV tuner is that it was apparently supposed to be an option going by the fact that dropping the standard Apple tuner card in and connecting it to the Apple Wings card with the Apple cable meant that it worked seamlessly with the Apple TV software. It just...

Here are some pics. I don't really know much about it other than I bought it in Japan (probably off Yahoo! Auctions but maybe at a HardOff) about 6 years ago. The card works just the same as a TV tuner card in other Macs. You can see how it looks indistinguishable from a normal GM3T with a Wings...

A cursory search didn't turn up any threads, and overclock.net suggests it can't be overclocked (or at least "clock chipped"). Just wondering if that's more likely to be due to a limitation of the CPU or a support chip unable to handle the speed, or if it's because the base timing can't be...

Macs usually need a Mac flashed card. I think there may have been a card out there with a "universal" flash but maybe not. I may be thinking of the super-easy 3dfx flashing process (basically you installed it alongside an already-working card, ran the 3dfx tool to change it to Mac, and rebooted...

I have a beige G3MT with internal Apple TV tuner. It's basically the same tuner card as that used in the 55/6500 models, with a ribbon cable going to the personality card. I don't know whether it's Apple factory or a dealer option, though, because it looks a little janky: the tuner card is...

Maybe, but there were still a few other manufacturers around in 1997/8. I'd bet it was likely the ixMicro TwinTurbo 128 w/8MB VRAM from the 9600, or possibly a Number 9 card of some sort. The 83MHz variant of the beige G3 was planned but dropped, even though many early machines were already...

I don't know if anybody made an LC PDS adapter, but Daystar (and possibly others) did make adapters to use the same accelerator in multiple different PDSes (SE, SE/30, IIci, IIx, IIsi, etc.). Maybe there's some inspiration to be taken from one of those. They were all variations of the 68000 or...