PM9600, what's the white slot for between the memory slots?

O

ohmelas

Registered
Hey Guys,

Here's another curiosity. What's the white slot for between the memory slots on the MOBO on the 9600? I'm curious.
 
Without actually seeing what you are talking about, it could be a slot for PCI card.
 
A guess is a slot for a level 2 cache card, the 300+ Mhz had L2 cache on the processor card leaving this function on the logic board unused. The slower 9600 appear to have cache soldered on logic board, so this may have been an unused left-over from 9500 models, or the processors slower than 300 Mhz had a L2 cache card in that slot. The system info is a little unclear about that.
 
It was put there incase Apple wanted to use it later. Don't know of anything that was ever made for it.
 
I'm confident that its not a PCI slot or AGP. I was unsure about other technologies. I know that some MOBO companies put their proprietary expansion slots on there for things like internal Modems, NICs, etc. I was unsure if Apple had done the same. BTW, I'm in love with this PowerMac. It's awesome! I've loaded this baby up in all 12 slots with 1.5GB Ram and two 32MB Radeon PCI 7000 cards as well as the HAMMER RAID 0+1 on two PCI cards. It's also expanded with a 10/100 NIC card and some nice digital audio stuff for my personal studio. I love this Mac. Smoking!
 
Click the ROM SIMM link above and download the PDF. Like I said, it's a ROM SIMM slot.
 
Actually, it was something that was in R & D but didn't make it.

Thinking about it, it is good that Apple was thinking of the future. It is sad that it didn't make the cut.
 
Just thinking about it makes my head hurt...

I was also aware that Orange Micro made a Pentium card that went somewhere in the Mac. Was it a special card slot like where the A/V Audio Card fits into the 9600?

The SIMM ROM. What would such an item be used for? Is that like a BIOS on the PC. Please advise.
 
ohmelas said:
Orange Micro made a Pentium card that went somewhere in the Mac. Was it a special card slot like where the A/V Audio Card fits into the 9600?

The SIMM ROM. What would such an item be used for? Is that like a BIOS on the PC. Please advise.
Click to expand...

The OrangeMicro cards are PCI. Have you got any spare slots? I prefer to see a USB/Firewire/ATA-133 card installed before something to run Win95.

The equivalent of BIOS is part PRAM, part Open Firmware. (Learn more about O.F. at http://bananajr6000.apple.com/ )

Inside the ROM chips are the instructions on how to do everything, i.e. draw pixels, talk to the SCSI bus, etc. It's also where the sample of the startup chime lives. These chips are soldered to the motherboard, so Apple figured if they ever needed to update them they would release them on a SIMM. They always found the bugs in ROM so minor they could be worked around via clever software, so no ROM SIMMs were ever released.
 
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