PowerCenter Pro 60MHz Bus

[_AP]

Hi. I have a PowerCenter Pro 210.(PowerMacintosh 7200)
It has the Catalyst motherboard, and supposedly goes up to a 60MHz bus officially according to my research.

I installed a Sonnet G3 450/1M. It all seems to work fine, but the bus runs at 45. (Makes sense 45 x 10). I was wondering if it's possible to have it run at a higher bus speed.

 

[chelseayr]

that crescendo is a fixed speed card which makes sense regarding having to clock the caches next to the cpu as well etc. and beside just about all apple-sold boards would only had been in the 40-50mhz range for most part so thast also what the accelerators are locking for to. a powercomputing-specific extreme[speed] accelerator might be really rare if they had ever been sold in the first place if you ask me?

 

[Powerbase]

I think the Z-Force from Powerlogix had dip switch setting for up to 60MHz, I don't know if they went beyond it. The manual on the waybackmachine has its dip switch image corrupted, of course.

 

[_AP]

So the sonnet may be locked at 45MHz?

I have a G3 NewerTech, and another with dipswitches. But they're 300MHz.

 

[Powerbase]

Generally, if they had dip switches it was for adjusting the bus speeds and multiplier.

 

[_AP]

Seems like they only go up to 50MHz bus.

 

[chelseayr]

yeah @_AP this is one source I like to use (even if I'm not 1000% certain it was perfect but mm) https://macinfo.de/hardware/boards-g2.html and as you can see even the newest biggest powermacintosh in name of 9600 still was only 50mhz out of the box at the most .. so powercomputing was abit unique in whatever they had done to the system bus for themselves

 

[_AP]

I knew about the bus speeds on different macs. Thanks. That's good to know.

 

[Byrd]

Sonnet cards were pretty vanilla in the day with their upgrades often going for conservative bus settings for broader compatibility. I suppose most are still around and working which is good. You probably want any other brand with a DIP switch setting to experiment with bus speeds, notably the XLR8 MACH speed carrier card.

 

[_AP]

I'll keep an eye out but it's quite fast regardless.

I wonder if the carrier ones work with BeOS.

 

[Franklinstein]

Sonnet's slogan is (or was) "No switches. No control panels. Simply fast." So their products are generally fixed and/or auto-configurating drop-ins. Apple slot CPUs have fixed oscillators on them that generate the bus speed, so it stands to reason that Sonnet cards do, too. This is how you can drop a 120, 132, or 150MHz CPU into the same machine (like an 8500) and it "just works:" the CPU dictates the necessary bus speed. Because Sonnet wants their products to go into as many systems as possible, they design for a middle ground, which in this case is a 45MHz bus. Most Macs and their installed RAM and peripherals will run stably at that speed.

 

[dv-]

You might just want to trade the Sonnet for a different brand.

I have a 350Mhz PowerLogix G4 card in my 7300 that has DIP switches for selectable bus speeds, etc., so I think it can be configured for, say, 60Mhz bus and 360 MHz clock.

Here’s an eBay auction for one with a nice picture of the DIP settings.

PowerLogix PowerForce G3 500MHz 1M Accelerator Card PCI Power Mac 7500/8500/9600 | eBay

For sale is a PowerLogix PowerForce 500/250/1MB G3 upgrade card for PCI-based Power Macintosh systems, similar to the Sonnet Crescendo line of upgrade cards. Power Macintosh 7300. Power Macintosh 7500.

www.ebay.com

 

[_AP]

This site here has dip switch settings for a MaxPowr G3. I have a few of these, and two have dipswitches. Am I correct in understanding that this will not go past 50MHz bus speed? I'm curious if the 500 can get to 60MHz bus speed.

Maybe I should try and sell some NewerTechs and try and get the PowerLogix, but don't really want to.

 

[pathw]

I have an XLR8 MACh Speed G3 in a PowerComputing PowerTower (was 180). According to the XLR8 Control Panel I have the bus running at 58.2 MHz. TechTool confirms that the bus is running at 58 MHz. (Processor is at 465.4 MHz; backside cache at 155.1 MHz).

 

[LaPorta]

To be a total party killer: is it going to make that much of a difference with what you plan on doing with it?

 

[_AP]

Not really, I just wanted to push it as far as it can go. At the moment, a child uses it to play Kid Pix on Mac and Doom on BeOS. The PowerCenter Pro is interesting as it has (I believe) the fastest bus speed of any pre-g3 macs. I'm assuming a 500MHz cpu would run at 600 with that bus speed. Would I notice it? Maybe not.