Quadra 650 nubus

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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

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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.

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

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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.

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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. ...

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/ 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.

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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

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

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.

... 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 ...

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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

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

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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.

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.

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 :-/

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

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.

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.

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.

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__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 )

Yeah, internal scsi thru the built in motherboard connection. No other HDs

Forgot to mention that it is a 50 pin hard drive. Not sure why it has four jumpers but there is no adapters and it is definatly 50 pin.

EDIT - alright jumpers put on SCSI term and term power, and now it is recognized by HD SC setup, formatting as I type this, thanks!

1. What is the model number of the drive, this is normally printed on a label somewhere?

2. What does "SCSI probe" say about the device?

3. Have you tried adding an additional SCSI terminator?

Alright guys, more problems.

During the format, the mac accidentally got unplugged and on restart hd setup doesn't recognize it again. SCSI Probe show a bullet beside the 0 , the legend at the bottom says this means "no data". Any way I can get this thing formatted and maybe it will mount?

During the format, the mac accidentally got unplugged and on restart hd setup doesn't recognize it again.

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If this was during the low-level format then you are likely to have turned your drive into just a curious lump of metal and plastic.

There are two times when loss of power can be fatal to hardware...

i. low level format of SCSI drive

ii. flashing of system eeprom

I think you may have hit case i.

Yeah thats what I was worried, i guess i'm screwed then >

I guess its back to ebay if this thing is "a curious lump of metal and plastic"

The stupidest thing happened too - I opened a drawer to get a radio out, a loose cord caught on the power cord and pulled it out of the wall.

This is the HD btw

http://cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=140239421603&ssPageName=STRK:MEWN:IT&ih=004

I'd go for one pulled from a Mac, as they're much easier to format. Otherwise, you will need something beyond your stock install disks to initialize the drive - something like Silverlining, or a patch (which is widely available) for the HD formatting software that came stock with Apple machines of your era.

A WD 7200 RPM drive is most likely going to be wasted on the scsi bus of a Q650 anyway.

Same seller:

http://cgi.ebay.ca/Quantum-Fireball-ST-4-3GB-50-PIN-SCSI-hard-drive-4310ST_W0QQitemZ140241880000QQihZ004QQcategoryZ168QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

I have one of these in my Q650 and it works exceedingly well: quiet, roomy, and perfectly snappy for its intended purposes. (It's partitioned into a couple of 2.x GB drives under MacOS7.6.1, which is necessary with a drive of this size under anything less than OS8.1, and makes for the most efficient use of space under any OS a 68k machine can run - since a Quadra can't boot from an HFS+ formatted drive).

Yeah, thanks i think i will go after one of those. The only reason i got the other one was that it was cheap. My HD SC Setup is patched btw and it was working until it got unplugged. I guess it is going in the trash.

I guess it is going in the trash.

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.... and you were so close! :?:

I guess it is going in the trash.

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.... and you were so close! :?:

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[:O] ]'>

Try low-level formatting it again; SCSI drives as a whole don't die if you botch a low-level format, you just have to low-level format them _again_. That's because the drive firmware is stored on a chip instead of on the disk.

You might need to use something like SilverLining or the MicroNet Utility.

Try low-level formatting it again; SCSI drives as a whole don't die if you botch a low-level format, you just have to low-level format them _again_. That's because the drive firmware is stored on a chip instead of on the disk.

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Yeah, but it doesn't show up in Hd setup anymore, have to try another program i guess.

hd setup doesn't recognize it again

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Not much opportunity to try another low-level format, really.

SCSI Probe is pretty good, it does nothing with a disk's data, it just talks to the SCSI controller on the disk, which in this case I think, has got very confused.

Have you also tried the patched Apple HD SC Setup? I've used it on my Quadra with a non-Apple hard drive and it worked.

http://www.jagshouse.com/hdscsetup.html

http://lowendmac.com/sable/07/mac-drive-setup-patch.html

EDIT: Nevermind, just saw your post where you mentioned that you already tried that. :I

HD SC Setup (patched)

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I took that to mean he was already using a patched version.

Yeah, but it doesn't show up in Hd setup anymore, have to try another program i guess.

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Try Anubis 3.01, it is quite recent (works perfectly wih ATTO Silicon Express IV) and available here:

http://www.fenestrated.net/~macman/stuff/SiliconExpress/

And it is capable of creating partitions with 64k blocks, that means partitions as large as 4 GB under os 7.5.5

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

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Yup, at least with Quadra, I don't have nubus powerpc to try it there ;-)

'Low-level' formatting, which defines the data tracks and their spacing, is done at the factory with precision gear. Probably no formatting utility that gets into the hands of users can do this, and certainly the gear isn't available to them.

Formatting a drive by a user is a matter of erasure of existing data (if erasure is invoked) and writing the logical structures (partitions) and drivers to the disk. In Apple's case this is at least five partitions, only one of which becomes the 'volume' mounted on the desktop.

If you cannot 'see' the data volume on the desktop you can choose between dead drive, scrambled or missing driver, defective cabling or power supply to the drive. You know which you can eliminate in this case because you are there. If it is the driver, because early Apple disk utilities are less capable of 'taking over' drives that have been formatted with a third-party utility, although they should be able to unmount and repair Apple-formatted drives, you need Silverlining (LaCie), FWB's Hard Disk ToolKit, Intech's HD SpeedTools, ATTO's utility or the like. All of these can follow Apple's partition scheme and provide the requisite drivers (plural).

de

HD SC Setup (patched)

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I took that to mean he was already using a patched version.

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Yes, I noted in my post that I saw that after the fact.

Try a little utility called Lido if you can find it. It's worked miracles for me on SCSI drives, where HD SC and SCSIprobe have failed me.

I guess its back to ebay if this thing is "a curious lump of metal and plastic"

The stupidest thing happened too - I opened a drawer to get a radio out, a loose cord caught on the power cord and pulled it out of the wall.

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In such situations, I have had very good luck reformating the drive on a PC with an Adaptec SCSI card. If you have such available or have a friend with one, you may be able to recover the drive.

The older Adaptec cards such as the 2940UW have an option at start-up to press ctrl-A and enter the firmware routines. One of those routines will do a low level format of the hard drive and I've found that that will usually recover the drive for Macintosh use.

Since you can probably find a 2940UW for $10 or lieing around in a ditch waiting to be picked up, your biggest obstacle would be coming up with a PC to try it in.

Alright i downloaded Lido, put it on a CD. The program opened but as it got to ID 0 it threw errors at me and I was unable to do anything (one said unable to read drive capacity, other said something like bad scsi command). I'm trying Anubis Plus right now , seems to be working but I am worried about the errors in Lido.

Alright, thanks guys the disk intitialized with Anubis and it works now.

Excellent news!

w00t! I'm very glad to hear that it's working for you!

Awesome!

http://cgi.ebay.ca/SuperMac-Thunder-II-Video-Card_W0QQitemZ110263403993QQihZ001QQcategoryZ4601QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD4VQQcmdZViewItem

Too bad its so far away, in Australia.

Techfury90, you say "The Jackhammers only are 20 MB/s"

I bought six of them new (different type), and have to proclaim that three of the pci ones with 6 seagate 12450Ws total were faster in benchmarks than the unix NULL device on a high end sun workstation, which did not have to actually even store bytes. ( dev/nul )

Keep in mind the seagate 12450W was a fragile special type of drive only made once in history and had TWO heads per surface of each platter. TWO ! They were very fragile. But in 1994 they were 12 megabytes per second each sustained if formatted with 2K blocks. With 512 byte blocks four drives got 34 MB/sec on quadra 840avs using a pair of two jackhammer cards.

But its amusing to point out that PowerPC macs were slow as hell for a very very long time for slot I/O vs Quadra 840av and its NuBus. (quadra had double clocked nubus, and the cpu was 80 mhz internally, not 40, if you are literal).

i think a 650 has a direct processor slot allowing access at 33 Mhz/32 bit, but few cards ever made for it I assume.

I think you are right though about one card being overkill for it though, if xfering data to the motherboard and not another nubus card.

In a early Quadra 20 Mhz (not 10) was possible, and for 32 bit xfers that would be bursts of 80 MB/sec between two non-apple nubus products.

in later quadraas (840av) the slots really ran allowing 40 MB sec with ease and practically begging for two jackhammer cards.

Interestingly, RAM could barely eat the data that fast so you had to do something such as move it 128 bits at a time per opcode , when not doing DMA from scsi, via MOVE16 instructions using the cache controller as a high speed datapump.

Anyway I am biased because I own few quadras, used to work at FWB for a few years, and also used to run the fastest RAID anyone could afford (or not afford) to construct for specialized animation pruposes (uncompressed full frame video playback).

But if a person asks what the fastest setup could be, chances are they want to know their options.

----

I am just bummed that motorola was so many years ahead of the world of technology. Motorola REFUSED to consider ever making 5 volt modern CPUS ever again and wanted everyone to recreate entire motherboards oriented around the astounding 3 volt 68060 chip

a chip that would have rewritten history and made the powerpc look like a sick joke

but the world had been 5 volt for the previous 40 years and refused to budge.

nothing became of the beloved 68060 , not even at NeXT

ov course soon after the world learned how to run the cpu at different voltages than mobo, and 3 volt became a norm, then 2v, 1.5 , 1.2 v

poor motorola, they were right, and 5 years ahead of the world

do not ever forget, it was 3.5 times faster than a 68040 chip in benchmarks

and if apple went for it moto would have made more newer ones.

RISC was a dead end. Even in 2008 the CPU champion is a CISC (the pentium offspring x86).

Now RISC is dead for apple. Shame on apple for not making even one apple with a 68060 to run rings around your initial powermacs.

TRISC was a dead end. Even in 2008 the CPU champion is a CISC (the pentium offspring x86).

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I dunno about the internal workings of the AMD chips, but the modern Intel chips have a very RISC-like microcode that all the x86 instructions are broken down into. The silicon doesn't actually have paths for the x86 instructions, which makes the RISC vs CISC debate extremely poorly defined.

CISC died when the Pentium Pro came out, its been RISC ever since internally from Intel, the K5 series (Pentium equivalent) I think was RISC as well from AMD.

The best thing about PPC was the FPU completely obliterated anything 68K (even the 68060), so moving to PPC was smart. 68060 wasn't even compatible with the rest of the 68K line before it, so it wasn't going to be used by Apple anyway.

While I love Nubus, it sucks compared to PCI.

I was under the impression that the CPUs beyond the original Pentium (I believe starting with the PPro) were a hybrid of both CISC and RISC methods. I remember going through this article back in 1999 from Ars Technica:

http://arstechnica.com/cpu/4q99/risc-cisc/rvc-1.html

Incidentally, there's another followup almost 10 years later from that article, specifically in regards to mobile processors, and especially Atom:

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/risc-vs-cisc-mobile-era.ars

Well some translation is going on at the front end, but all the work should be RISC.

From my understanding RISC is just made up of small simple commands that you can speed up and pipeline, while CISC used larger more complex blocks that you had to deal with in specific order.

To keep compatability with the old desgins you needed a chip that handled the older code, so a translating unit seems to have been the smart thing to do.

Under a microscope a new CPU core probably looks alot different then a 386 one.

The way I heard it was that the idea behind RISC was that the instructions weren't as powerful as CISC instructions, but could be manipulated in more ways than CISC instructions. Example: It might take several RISC instructions to do the same thing as one CISC instruction, but those less powerful RISC instructions could be recombined in different ways to do things more efficiently than using more complex CISC instructions which may have been more wasteful of CPU and memory resources.

Not quite, simplisticly...

(a) large register file - reducing memory accesses

( B) same length instructions - simplify fetch queue

© each instruction takes one clock cycle - rather than variable number

CISC have variable length instructions and variable execution time per instruction.