Power Mac 9600 O.G. Guide

[DieHard]

Do you have a pic ?.... AFAIK, the pic you posted has a "personality card" and is NOT on the MB ?

[MacTron]

Do you have a pic ?.... AFAIK, the pic you posted has a "personality card" and is NOT on the MB ?

Not at all.
I have a PM8500 and a PM8600. (and even a Q840 AV )
ALL is in the MB. there is no "personality card" on those models. Only a ribbon cable to the connectors panel (RCAs and S-Video). I'll open one of mine AV's and I'll take some pictures ...

[MacTron]

From top to bottom, you can see
- A USB PCI card
- An empty PCI slot
- A Firewire PCI card
- and the ribbon cable to the rear panel connectors
- The CPU card (with the heat sink)

[supernova777]

wow ok i was totally wrong - this computer is not a g3 all in one its a Performa 5200 from 1995!
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_performa/specs/mac_performa_5200cd.html

[DieHard]

Way cool... thanks... somehow, my old brain forgot that... I now remember

[supernova777]

the 8600 i have a chance to buy has the crescendo 800mhz upgrade installed!
http://www.everymac.com/upgrade_cards/sonnettech/crescendo_g4_pci/crescendo_pci_g4_800.html

wasnt syntho looking desperately for this?
or was that the 1ghz crescendo he was looking for.. i cant remember..
didnt he end up using his 9600 with stock cpu? (>300mhz?)

[Syntho]

I was looking for a 1ghz version, but I don't care about them at this point. The stock 9600s with the 350mhz cpu is good enough. If you read above the Sonnet cpus have an extension that's incompatible with MOTU software/hardware, which I use all the time, so I went with a Newertech upgrade. Newertech cpus are definitely preferable, but I leave my 9600s stock anyway.

[supernova777]

how much could i get for the 800mhz version if i bought the 8600 + sold it.. trouble is the guy doesnt have the original cpu

[Syntho]

I'm going to guess maybe $85 or something. You can get an original CPU for your 8600 no problem. If you really want an 8600, and you don't use MOTU stuff, you'd probably do well by just leaving the Sonnet CPU in there.

[Raptor007]

This guide is awesome!  I've had several Macs throughout the beige days, but the Power Mac 9600 with G3 upgrade I got recently is just... a little different... and now I have a better understanding of why.  For example, I upgraded the RAM at the same time I added a Mac-flashed Voodoo3, and I assumed the long delay before video was the Voodoo's fault!  Now I know about the slow memory test.

It turns out I have a Tsunami board with a NewerTech G3 upgrade, and I'm guessing the additional layer of slow cache has something to do with the instability I've been experiencing.

If you get out your soldering iron and unsolder the R31 resistor (which really just acts as a simple jumper), it decouples the L2 cache from the board and essentially turns a Tsunami board into a Kansas board. Try this if you wish, but just go for a Kansas machine in the first place and be done with it.

Has anyone here tried this?  Syntho, it sounds like you read about this somewhere but haven't actually done it to your machines.  Do you remember where you found that information?  I just want to make sure I'm checking my sources before I go after the motherboard with a soldering iron.

[Syntho]

I haven't done it myself but it's definitely the correct information. I read about it in a couple different places, mainly the 68kmla forum.

[Raptor007]

Thanks Syntho!  I have one more question about this:

If you decide to upgrade a Tsunami machine with a 3rd party CPU, you’ll have all of your CPU juice running though a slow 512k L2 cache at all times whether you like it or not.

Does that mean this motherboard cache option doesn't actually work on the Tsunami boards?

[Syntho]

Also to note: seeing that a G3/G4 upgrade card has L2 cache on the CPU, if you install one into a Tsunami board, the upgrade card's superior L2 cache will turn into L3 cache as noted in the Apple System Profiler. Having L3 cache compared to not having it is a benefit generally, sure, but not when you have superior L3 cache to your L2 cache.

I don't know exactly how it works, but L3 cache becomes present when you install these cards into Tsunami machines, when you're only supposed to see L2 at most. I believe the program still works, but it's controlling its L2 cache as now-demoted L3 cache.

[Raptor007]

I don't know exactly how it works, but L3 cache becomes present when you install these cards into Tsunami machines, when you're only supposed to see L2 at most. I believe the program still works, but it's controlling its L2 cache as now-demoted L3 cache.

I found an interesting utility from NewerTech installed on there called Gauge Pro, which reports the G3 card's cache as L2 and the motherboard's cache as L3:



Intuitively, that makes sense to me; the flow of information seems like it would be from the memory to the motherboard to the processor card to the CPU.  But maybe it's only behaving this way because I'm using the MAXpowr G3 Extension.  Or maybe it's not behaving this way at all, but it thinks it should because of my MAXpowr G3 Control settings.

Either way, whether running 7.6.1 or 9.1, it's having significantly more application malfunctions than on my stock G3s and G4s... but there are also a lot of other variables involved.  I'll keep messing with it. 

[Syntho]

My advice: Mod it as little as possible. All I've got on mine is a Sonnet PCI card for an SSD (which is actually for a recording drive, not the OS), a SCSI adapter and faster/quieter SCSI HD as the main drive (having a SCSI drive as the OS drive is important), and a few software hacks. I modded and tested my rig for an entire year and learned that the more I fooled with it, the more problems I had.

[Raptor007]

Thanks Syntho!  I tried simplifying the hardware configuration to the bare minimum usable, but to no avail.  This is after I'd already done my best to trim to a minimal extension set (and had freezes/errors with extensions off).  My 9600 didn't come with the original processor card, so more and more I suspected the G3 upgrade was the source of my problems.

Because my 9600/200 would have a 50MHz system bus with the stock processor card, I turned on dip switch 2 on the G3/300 card to use a 50MHz system bus per Siber-Sonic's findings.  It worked, but it wasn't the solution to my stability problems.  Still, I'm guessing this is the best mode for any 50MHz bus 604e system with this G3 upgrade, and similarly you might want 1,2,4 for 50MHz bus Kansas systems.

The Solution: I finally made some progress after digging into the G3 upgrade issues on The 6400 Zone, specifically the parts about Speculative Access.  Newer Technology claimed they had solved the these problems in hardware on their MAXpowr G3 so a software fix wouldn't be necessary, but I don't believe it anymore.  I found an extension called ROM Fixer (download) that disables G3 Speculative Access, and it seems to have solved my stability issues.



Among other things, MechWarrior 2 was giving me a consistent, repeatable crash at the pilot menu when Speculative Access was "Enabled (I/O Compatible)", but now it works!

It looks like my only remaining problems are with files that already got corrupted (especially application resource forks) so now I'm doing fresh software installs.  Aside from that, it can get stuck at the grey screen with cursor when it starts booting, but the Apple three-finger salute usually gets it moving.  I assume this is another oddity of the G3 upgrade.

Hopefully someone else struggling with a G3-upgraded Mac will find this information useful! 

All I've got on mine is a Sonnet PCI card for an SSD (which is actually for a recording drive, not the OS), a SCSI adapter and faster/quieter SCSI HD as the main drive (having a SCSI drive as the OS drive is important)

I'm using the AztecMonster II to boot from a SATA SSD on the SCSI bus, which is working great.  (The stability problems were happening before I did this upgrade.)

[Syntho]

These things are beasts once you work out all the bugs. I currently have two 350 machines and a 200 machine. All have a 15k Cheetah drive as the main HD with the SCSI adapter noted above. They're whisper quiet and pretty fast, considering. I ran into the same CPU trouble as you did, then got sick of it and decided to run it stock. Rock solid since then!

[macStuff]

this is a great refresher course for those who forget all the details after almost 20 years!

[Raptor007]

For some reason yesterday, FWB Hard Disk Toolkit 2.0 hung while trying to add another partition to my boot SSD on the SCSI bus (with SATA/SCSI adapter).  Since then, I can't seem to boot from it anymore, and the drive doesn't even show up on the SCSI bus in utilities like Drive Setup.

So, I decided to borrow the Sonnet Tempo SATA PCI card from my B&W G3 and see if the 9600 would boot from its SATA SSD on that (in PCI slot A1).  It does! 

(I also wiped and repartitioned the SSD with Drive Setup, so now it has an Apple driver on it instead of FWB.)

[DieHard]

I am not a fan of 3rd party drivers like FWB Hard Disk Toolkit 2.0 or Hard Disk Speed Tools when formatting/partitioning Drives.  They can get quirky for booting and sometimes partitions do not auto-mount or even disappear when moving internal drives from system to system.

However, HDST has been the only tool I have found that will successfully partition Large FireWire drives (500GB or more); the internal Mac OS drive setup will only let you format/partition them as a single large drive.  So it's either use HDTS if you want smaller partitions or you have to remove the drive from the FW case do it internally with Mac OS drive setup, and then re-install in the external case (which is hard for some well-sealed factory made external FW drives)