Hello All,
I'm a happy man today. I've now able to take my aged Power Mac 9600/350 and my aged PowerMac 9650/233 server give them a new life. I enjoy the platform. I have 1.5GB of RAM in each of them with an ATI Radeon 7000 32MB Mac edition in each. each of these aged machines also contains a Tempo Trio card. This is a Sonnet Tech decked out machine! They're now both graduating to Sonnet Technology's Crescendo PCI G3 500Mhz program.
I use Logic Audio 4.8, Photoshop, Illustrator, Office 2001 and like all good Mac users iTunes. I'm praying to see some performance increases.
The Objective:
Take an ailing and aged Power Macintosh 9650 server that's pretty much stock and upgrade it with a processor card (500Mhz G3), USB/Firewire and IDE and see how it fares against its 604e 9600/350 brother in the same office.
First Impression:
I've been eye-balling the card from the web-site now for about 4 healthy weeks. It looks like a replacement card that will fit directly into that slot on the mother-board of my 9xxx PM, however, upon opening the box I was strangely surprised that card looks so much smaller than the Power PC 604e that's sitting in the maching. The manual shipped to me in excitement almost freaked me out as its written in French, Spanish and English. I noticed the English last. I found the manual instructions easy, brisk and fast. I finished them in less than 10 minutes.
The Procedure
I installed OS 9.0 on a fresh machine and rebooted. (15 minutes)
It's very basic. Although it comes with a 3.5" floppy (my Mac's is in need of help) I downloaded the latest version of the software with ease from their site. The file from the site was one version more advanced but kept giving me shrinkwrap error messages so I went with the floppy. It was a small file (1.0MB) and took less than one minute to download.
I shut down the computer after this software installed. I opened it up and slipped out the 233 604e and replaced it with a G3 500 card that came in the box. My is it smaller than the 604e.
I turned it on and the system rebooted flawlessly. I shut down the computer, reopened it and installed the TRIO PCI card. No problems. The system booted up with out issue.
I then installed OS 9.1 update (which has the Firewire and USB drivers on it) and I was in business with a screaming G3 500Mhz machine with Firewire, USB and IDE/133. Additionally, I had 1.5GB of memory and a new 120GB hard drive for less than the price of a new eMac. (7 minutes)
In all this was very quick. Now my PowerMac's have USB/Firewire/G3 compatibility.
Performance Issues
Right on boot up I noticed a positive difference. The system seemed to flow a lot smoother! It seemed to boot more quickly and over all felt better. The operating system windows seemed to open and draw better and faster. I can only apply that emotion to it with out the facts. For you techies' out there...I decided to run some benchmark testing to see how that would work.
Running a benchmark on my 604e/350 with Norton Utilities it posted a number of 529. The other benchmarks in the program posted the 604e/200 at 408 and the iMacG3/233 at 581. I ran Norton Utilities on a fresh installation as well as I had done on the 604e/350 and found a whopping difference. The benchmark came in at 1373! Holy S%$ or more than triple my performance previously.
Using some other programs, I'll give you my initial thoughts. iTunes worked where previously on the 604e/233 it did not. I opened up Reason and ran it with out issue using the same demo about 1/3 of the processing power it was running at. It used to stall my CPU when playing some of the demos. I'm impressed! Great job Sonnet Technology for reviving my Mac!
Stupid Things
With my legacy Mac and my TRIO card installed previously on my PM9600 I decided to upgrade it. However, this posed a challenge since the CDRW drive I had in the PM9600 was an IDE drive running off of the TRIO card. This meant that it would not boot from the CD-ROM so that I could do a fresh installation. This was a major inconvenience since I had to swap out a CD-ROM drive, drop the old drive in (dig out some cabling and run with it.) If the boys and girls at Sonnettechnology could only help us out there with a patch or something that could allow my Mac to do other things with their products like boot from an IDE CD-ROM too--it would be great!
I'm a happy man today. I've now able to take my aged Power Mac 9600/350 and my aged PowerMac 9650/233 server give them a new life. I enjoy the platform. I have 1.5GB of RAM in each of them with an ATI Radeon 7000 32MB Mac edition in each. each of these aged machines also contains a Tempo Trio card. This is a Sonnet Tech decked out machine! They're now both graduating to Sonnet Technology's Crescendo PCI G3 500Mhz program.
I use Logic Audio 4.8, Photoshop, Illustrator, Office 2001 and like all good Mac users iTunes. I'm praying to see some performance increases.
The Objective:
Take an ailing and aged Power Macintosh 9650 server that's pretty much stock and upgrade it with a processor card (500Mhz G3), USB/Firewire and IDE and see how it fares against its 604e 9600/350 brother in the same office.
First Impression:
I've been eye-balling the card from the web-site now for about 4 healthy weeks. It looks like a replacement card that will fit directly into that slot on the mother-board of my 9xxx PM, however, upon opening the box I was strangely surprised that card looks so much smaller than the Power PC 604e that's sitting in the maching. The manual shipped to me in excitement almost freaked me out as its written in French, Spanish and English. I noticed the English last. I found the manual instructions easy, brisk and fast. I finished them in less than 10 minutes.
The Procedure
I installed OS 9.0 on a fresh machine and rebooted. (15 minutes)
It's very basic. Although it comes with a 3.5" floppy (my Mac's is in need of help) I downloaded the latest version of the software with ease from their site. The file from the site was one version more advanced but kept giving me shrinkwrap error messages so I went with the floppy. It was a small file (1.0MB) and took less than one minute to download.
I shut down the computer after this software installed. I opened it up and slipped out the 233 604e and replaced it with a G3 500 card that came in the box. My is it smaller than the 604e.
I turned it on and the system rebooted flawlessly. I shut down the computer, reopened it and installed the TRIO PCI card. No problems. The system booted up with out issue.
I then installed OS 9.1 update (which has the Firewire and USB drivers on it) and I was in business with a screaming G3 500Mhz machine with Firewire, USB and IDE/133. Additionally, I had 1.5GB of memory and a new 120GB hard drive for less than the price of a new eMac. (7 minutes)
In all this was very quick. Now my PowerMac's have USB/Firewire/G3 compatibility.
Performance Issues
Right on boot up I noticed a positive difference. The system seemed to flow a lot smoother! It seemed to boot more quickly and over all felt better. The operating system windows seemed to open and draw better and faster. I can only apply that emotion to it with out the facts. For you techies' out there...I decided to run some benchmark testing to see how that would work.
Running a benchmark on my 604e/350 with Norton Utilities it posted a number of 529. The other benchmarks in the program posted the 604e/200 at 408 and the iMacG3/233 at 581. I ran Norton Utilities on a fresh installation as well as I had done on the 604e/350 and found a whopping difference. The benchmark came in at 1373! Holy S%$ or more than triple my performance previously.
Using some other programs, I'll give you my initial thoughts. iTunes worked where previously on the 604e/233 it did not. I opened up Reason and ran it with out issue using the same demo about 1/3 of the processing power it was running at. It used to stall my CPU when playing some of the demos. I'm impressed! Great job Sonnet Technology for reviving my Mac!
Stupid Things
With my legacy Mac and my TRIO card installed previously on my PM9600 I decided to upgrade it. However, this posed a challenge since the CDRW drive I had in the PM9600 was an IDE drive running off of the TRIO card. This meant that it would not boot from the CD-ROM so that I could do a fresh installation. This was a major inconvenience since I had to swap out a CD-ROM drive, drop the old drive in (dig out some cabling and run with it.) If the boys and girls at Sonnettechnology could only help us out there with a patch or something that could allow my Mac to do other things with their products like boot from an IDE CD-ROM too--it would be great!
