Quadra 650 nubus

[russman]

Hey guys, new user on this forum.

I have an old Quadra 650, first computer I ever owned. Used it for years but a few years ago the HD burned out. I figured this was a good chance to upgrade to something newer. Well I did but i miss System 7 and all the excellent games/programs that I had access to before. I also miss the blazing fast speed and the surprisingly good video hardware on this thing. SO I pulled the motherboard out of a box, got the case unfrozen from the ground outside, cleaned it up and it runs great. I have a new hard drive coming in should be here next week, as well as a tray loading 4x cdrom to replace the caddy. This machine has 24 mb of ram which I may want to upgrade but we'll see.

Anyway, I was thinking if it would make any sense to add any upgrades. I have 2 nubus slots open, the other is blocked by the PPC PDS card, and I guess a video card would be nice. What would you guys reccomend? I looked on ebay but none of them really have any sort of specs or descriptions with them. The built in video is still really great though. Also, a network card would that be any better than the built in AAUI? I have the adapter.

I got some money to throw at this thing, want it to be the best system 7 machine i can get so let me know what you think.

Thanks, Russ

 

[TylerEss]

I think that if I wanted the best Quadra 650 I could build for general use in System 7, here's what I would do:

Sell the PPC card unless you really need PowerPC... it's not optimal for running System 7.

Get one of the NewerTech 50MHz 68040 upgrades

Max out the RAM

Get a SiliconExpress IV or a JackHammer SCSI card, hook it up to a 266x CF card on a IDE->Wide SCSI adaptor. A 15,000 RPM hard drive would probably provide comparable performance at a much lower price... the 18GB Cheetah 15K.III is fast, cool, quiet, and quite a bargain on the used market.

Replace the internal CDROM with a CD-RW

That leaves two NuBus slots you can use for any specialized tasks you might want the Quadra to accomplish. If you don't have any specialized tasks in mind, I'd put a nice video card and a 10/100 network card in those slots.

The Radius LeMans GT, VillageTronic MP520 or MP540, RasterOps PaintBoard Prism GT, and anything with "Thunder" in the name are all pretty good choices for fast, high-resolution video cards for System 7.

The end result would be a truly, excessively fast machine to run any version of System 7 you wanted. This is probably going more overboard than what you really had in mind, but I hope you enjoy the thought.

 

[russman]

Yeah, that would be awesome but it is a little too overboard lol. Where would you reccomend I look for the video card?

 

[TylerEss]

I don't know anymore of any source that's better than the others, but the folks on this board are usually pretty good about having things, and there's always eBay... not nearly as much good NuBus loot on there as there was about 5 years ago, but that's progress :-/

Before you get a video card, think about what monitor you want to use. If you're using a monitor that will work with your onboard video, it's probably best to keep the onboard video. It interfaces to the Mac directly, instead of via slow NuBus. Only get a video card if you have a big modern monitor and want to do 1024x768 or higher.

Accelerated NuBus cards are like 10x faster than motherboard video at things like window dragging where the video card can cache pixels, but motherboard video is almost always faster at dynamic things like QuickTime and Marathon.

 

[russman]

Yeah , I think i'll stick with the motherboard video, maybe just max out the ram. Thanks for the advice, appreciate it.

 

[techfury90]

266x? You must be joking. The Jackhammers only are 20 MB/s, and that assumes the machine can even handle that much data. Save your money and get a more reasonable card, something like an 80x. That's 12 MB/s there, still incredibly faster than the stock SCSI's 5 MB/s. But then again, if you're going to go to ridiculous extremes with a Jackhammer, SCSI-IDE adapter, and a CF card, I guess you might as well go with that.

 

[QuadSix50]

I've maxed out the RAM on my Quadra 650 and I'm using the stock video and CPU that came with the system. I did replace the old 500 MB hard drive with a 9.1 IBM hard drive, but that required the use of a 50-to-68 pin adapter. Eventually that hard drive died and I replaced it with a 4 GB that also required the same adapter. With this current setup, my Quadra is pretty snappy even with Mac OS 8.1. I would imagine a better Nubus video card would help but I'm fine for the moment. The CF card option might be a future project if I've got some spare change available. Just some ideas to consider.

 

[TylerEss]

266x? You must be joking. The Jackhammers only are 20 MB/s, and that assumes the machine can even handle that much data. ... But then again, if you're going to go to ridiculous extremes with a Jackhammer, SCSI-IDE adapter, and a CF card, I guess you might as well go with that.

The common speed grades come out to 12MB/s, 20MB/s, and 40MB/s, being 80x, 133x, and 266x. Since we want the JackHammer and the NuBus to be the bottleneck, I'd pick the 266x card just to be totally sure.

They're about double the 133x price, about USD80 for 8GB. On one hand, you're spending 40USD for more speed you probably aren't using, but on the other, you already sunk 80 into a SCSI-IDE adaptor }

I guess it's a toss-up, but I have to agree that the 133x card is the better idea.

 

[sylwiusz]

First - congrats on your return to roots I just acquired Quadra 800 - these were really nice machines - so much different than PCs from these times (unlike today, when most of inner parts you can find on PC motherboards...)

The built in video is still really great though.

Yeah, onboard video is really good in this generation of Quadras. In tests that I made using Norton Sysinfo it was about as fast as considered as one of the fastest Nubus video cards Supermac Thunder II GX(!!!) Perhaps Sysinfo is not the best in these tests, but still impressive results from built-in video. BTW - does someone know a better benchmarking program for video? So unless you want to go hires and 24 bit colour, it is probably better to stay with onboard video.

Also, a network card would that be any better than the built in AAUI? I have the adapter

No, it won't be. See official info from Apple:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=12000

Perhaps 10/100 mbps card would be faster, but it would eat bandwidth of Nubus that could be better used by for instance ATTO Silicon Express IV.

 

[Bunsen]

here's what I would do:
Sell the PPC card / Get one of the NewerTech 50MHz 68040 upgrades

ebay seller dlchief58 has them at pretty reasonable prices.

Get a SiliconExpress IV or a JackHammer SCSI card, hook it up to a 266x CF card on a IDE->Wide SCSI adaptor. A 15,000 RPM hard drive would probably provide comparable performance at a much lower price... the 18GB Cheetah 15K.III is fast, cool, quiet, and quite a bargain on the used market.

Unless you really want a quiet machine, the CF card and SCSI-IDE converter is a waste of money. I'd go for a fast 68 pin SCSI drive - the SCSI Nubus cards can mount them, whereas the onboard SCSI only takes 50 pin drives.

Fast SCSI drives can be noisy though. If you want a cheaper quiet option than the CF card, a SCSI-IDE converter and a Seagate IDE drive is worth considering.

There's a good list of Nubus video cards at http://www.lowendmac.com/video

266x? You must be joking. The Jackhammers only are 20 MB/s, and that assumes the machine can even handle that much data. ...

/ I'd pick the 266x card just to be totally sure.

They're about double the 133x price / I guess it's a toss-up, but I have to agree that the 133x card is the better idea.

How on earth can that be a "toss up"? It's a complete waste of money for speed you are definitely, not probably, not using.

but on the other, you already sunk 80 into a SCSI-IDE adaptor

There's a member here who has them for sale for about half that. Searchy searchy

 

[Quadraman]

I wouldn't be so hasty to ditch the PPC upgrade. I run a 601 in my Q700 with System 7.6.1 and it's just fine. A 601 upgraded Quadra can also run PPC only versions of Classic with a little trickery, so you have that to consider if you have enough RAM to run them. The ONLY way to run a modern web browser on a 68k machine is to use MacOS 8.5 or higher and get iCab 3.05 and a 601 in a Quadra CAN run it. A 601 isn't an optimal chip for running 68k code because Apple's emulation routines are slow but if you can get your hands on Speed Doubler it is a big improvement. It also depends on how fast your 601 upgrade is. They generally ranged from 50-100 mhz and the performance varies greatly between models.

 

[equill]

... I'd go for a fast 68 pin SCSI drive - the SCSI Nubus cards can mount them, whereas the onboard SCSI only takes 50 pin drives ...

With one (common) caveat, perhaps. If the SCSI card is reliant on extensions to work, the drives supported by it will not be bootable.

de

 

[sylwiusz]

With one (common) caveat, perhaps. If the SCSI card is reliant on extensions to work, the drives supported by it will not be bootable.

ATTO Silicon Express IV doesn't need any extensions to work and I can actually boot Quadra 800 from Cheetah 15k3 (I know, small overkill ;-) ) connected to it. I believe the FWB Jackhammer would work the same way, and these two are probably the only two Nubus 68 pin wide SCSI cards.

 

[Bolle]

ATTo SEIV only is bootable with the experimental ver2.0 ROM as it adds SCSI manager compatibility. the normal 1.65 ROM wont boot your mac from teh card i think.

Jackahmmers are always bootable.

 

[sylwiusz]

I have Atto SE IV in Quadra 800 with mentioned 18 GB Cheetah 15000 rpms disk divided in 5 partitions (partition size with 7.5x is limited to 4 GB n older Macs) and it is perfectly bootable! The only real problem is that you can't install different OS on another partition and choose between them using Startup Disk cdev - all these partitions are visible to it as one disk ;-)

I tried 2.x beta version of SE IV firmware, but after this update ATTO was not visible to ssytem as SCSI controller, so I had to revert to 1.65 firmware :-/

 

[Bolle]

ooohh... so it boots even with the 1.65? good to know...

 

[russman]

Alright, I came across a hard drive on ebay on the cheap. I'm relatively new to SCSI so I could use some help with this. When I turn on the computer the thing spins up (booting from a sys 7.5 disk tools floppy) but once the desktop shows up there is no sign of it (doesn't mount, doesn't show "do you want to format this disk" dialouge, doesn't show up in HD SC Setup (patched). I hope its not the disk. Maybe someone could give me a heads up on what the pins on the front do? I know these control which SCSI id the disk has but I don't really get it. This could be part of the problem if it is set up properly. The diagram reads like this:

33 34

. . RSVD

. . RSVD

. . LED+/RSVD

. . TERM PWR

. . TXD/RXD

. . SCSI TERM

. . TRGT INIT

. . UNIT ATTN

. . SCAM

. . DLYD START

. . AUTO START

. . SPNDL SYNC

. RSVD/LCD-

. . SCSI ID3

. . SCSI ID2

. . SCSI ID1

. . SCSI ID0

Corresponding to the diagram, there are plastic jumpers on SCSI ID3, SCSI ID2, and SCSI ID0. The others do not have jumpers.

 

[porter]

I have a Quadra 700 and running A/UX I was getting regular disk checks on start up after a clean shutdown with a Quantum Fireball 3.2Gb disk.

I swapped it for a smaller disk and came to the conclusion that the Quadra was cutting the power before the Fireball had completed it's queued/delayed writes. Eg, the mac thought the data was written, the disk hadn't actually completed the writes.

Otherwise I'm a minimalist, original spec, max ram, decent disk, network if it needs it, that's it.

 

[TylerEss]

The diagram reads like this:
33 34

. . RSVD

. . RSVD

. . LED+/RSVD

. . TERM PWR

. . TXD/RXD

. . SCSI TERM

. . TRGT INIT

. . UNIT ATTN

. . SCAM

. . DLYD START

. . AUTO START

. . SPNDL SYNC

. RSVD/LCD-

. . SCSI ID3

. . SCSI ID2

. . SCSI ID1

. . SCSI ID0

Corresponding to the diagram, there are plastic jumpers on SCSI ID3, SCSI ID2, and SCSI ID0. The others do not have jumpers.

__IGNORE ALL THIS IF YOU'RE USING A NuBus SCSI CARD__

The fact that you have 4 instead of 3 SCSI ID jumpers indicates that you have a 68-pin SCSI drive instead of an older 50-pin one. Older 50-pin SCSI only supports SCSI ID numbers up to seven. Your biggest problem is probably that jumper on SCSI ID bit 3.

The correct jumper settings will depend upon where the disk is installed in your Mac:

If it's internal, with no other hard disks, you probably want to remove all the jumpers, then put one jumper on the "TERM PWR" and one on the "SCSI TERM" line.

If it's external, set TERM PWR but not SCSI TERM. Then, set a SCSI ID that isn't already in use. Use a tool like SCSIProbe (copy it onto your disk tools floppy... it's small) to check which IDs you're already using.

Setting the SCSI ID is pretty simple with a little binary math; the SCSI ID signals 0 through 3 are for the bits of the SCSI ID number. The #3 jumper is worth 8, the #2 4, the #1 2 and the #0 jumper is worth 1. Add up the values of the jumpers that are in place to get the SCSI ID.

(example: jumpers on #1 and #2 == 2 + 4 = SCSI ID 6; no jumpers == SCSI ID 0 )