Maxing out the 9500

If somebody is looking to upgrade an older Mac and doesn't already have an ATA-100/133 setup, I think it'd be stupid to pursue one over an S-ATA setup.

We're at the point where S-ATA is both cheaper and more widespread.

It depends, most of the throw away computers and drives you find today ane still EIDE, and I don't see the need for a 200GB+ drive in a 9500 so ATA cards (now worth much less then they used to, and are OS 7 compatible to boot) are still nice to have on PCI Powermacs.

But if you're looking to upgrade an older machine, especially going to the extent of upgrading the entire drive system and buying a controller card, chances are you aren't going to do it with thrown away parts.

S-ATA cards are cheap. Large S-ATA drives can be had for under $50 from places like NewEgg. IDE/ATA is just, IMO, silly to pursue if you planning on buying all the parts you're going to need anyways.

It depends, most of the throw away computers and drives you find today ane still EIDE, and I don't see the need for a 200GB+ drive in a 9500 so ATA cards (now worth much less then they used to, and are OS 7 compatible to boot) are still nice to have on PCI Powermacs.

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Who says it has to be 200GB+? I was gonna put in a 10 GB, at the max. I use hardly any storage.

Now my 500GB USB Hard Drive, is a SATA drive, as discovered by a Google search. I might pop the case open and shove it in my 9500 if I get the SATA card.

And we're back, after a 4+ hour dreadful attempt t oget video. Turns out my one and only monitor, in which 5 computers are sharing, finally kicked off.

Anywho, I got my nice little 15 inch LCDer hooked up. Everything is beautiful.

I have this generic FireWire card I got a few years ago. I think its the exact same one as on the OWC store, but I bought mine from eBay. I read somewhere here that ANY OCHI compatible card will work with OS 8.5+? This is OHCI compatbile, and have it installed in my 9500 running OS 9. However, it's not doing anything. I don't know if I need a driver, as it's generic. System Profiler just lists it as "PCI Card" with nothing specific in the card data/description.

Any ideas?

I suppose that the system recognizes the card, is better than nothing.

Have you installed the Firewire extensions?

Have you installed the Firewire extensions?

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Yes.

Have you tried plugging anything into it?

My Echo soundcard shows up as 'PCI Card' and works fine.

Have you tried plugging anything into it?
My Echo soundcard shows up as 'PCI Card' and works fine.

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Ah thanks, it worked!

Weird that it doesn't show up as anything, though..

Dare I do it? I'm thinking of maxing out the RAM in the 9500. OS 9.1 has been a little sluggish, and I would like to assign at least 256 MB RAM to Netscape 7.01. What kind of RAM do I need? Should I even attempt this?

What kind of hardware/software/OS should I use to get the most out of this machine?

Edit: Will Sonnet's Allegro USB and FireWire cards work with a 9500 w/ Crescendo G4 upgrade, even though the requirements state a G3 B&W or Higher? What about the TSATA?

Thanks.

Take a stroll around—or take a net and trawl around—these forums using 9500 and FPM as your search terms. Even though the 9500 can take 1.5GiB in 128MB FPM (only) DIMM cards, the game is scarcely worth the candle under OS 9. VM (1GiB max) does not coexist well with more than about 930MiB of RAM, and you may need to hive off a persistent RAM Disk to get around the hiccup. Although a G3/400MHz 9500 was my favourite Beige muscle Mac for quite a while, a Kansas 9650/G4/800MHz has usurped its place without raising even a glow, let alone a sweat.

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Installing six 128MB DIMMs would be a safe and very effective upgrade. OWC sell these for $18 each and my 9600/G4/450MHz is largely happy with them.

The 9500/9600 and related models can be fussy about which PCI card goes in which slot. Be prepared to perform a lot of card swapping and PMU resets to find a stable combination.

It is only worth maxing a 9500/9600 if you wish to use software that can exploit it. The obvious choices are PhotoShop or video editing, but alternative operating systems such as BeOS or Linux can make it worthwhile too. Mac OS 9.x will fly on it, OS X will be adequate but web browsers may well be swamped by a deluge of CSS and Flash cruft.

if youre going leopard get a GeForce 6200 PCI and falsh it to mac. it supports core image even tho its a PCI card. and youd get a whopping 512MB of VRAM

bad thing is that card wont work with 10.4 i guess. its leo only.

if youre going leopard get a GeForce 6200 PCI and falsh it to mac. it supports core image even tho its a PCI card. and youd get a whopping 512MB of VRAM
bad thing is that card wont work with 10.4 i guess. its leo only.

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They got those Nvidia cards working in Old World? When I last checked all that, some could be flashed for Mac but due to the way the hardware works it won't function in the pre-G3 systems.

oh :O

dunno then. heard of them to work in G3s so i guessed its ok for the older PCI macs as well. :|

A flashed Radeon might be a good choice - thoughts?

and does the GeForce 5200 PCI work in old world then? would still give you core image if youre lucky :|

and does the GeForce 5200 PCI work in old world then? would still give you core image if youre lucky :|

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Not that I know of. You can look up the details on Strangedogs plus almost anything else you'd want to know about flashing.

From what I can recall, something about how the Nvidia cards interface with the system isn't compatible with old world. They'll be fine in a B&W G3 but anything older isn't going to go. I haven't kept up for almost a year now so it's possible they've worked something out. You'd have to dig through the boards.

The Radeon 9200 should be plenty for a 9500/9600 though. Remember that write speeds through the PCI bus (data sent to the video card) are capped at about 40MB/s due to the controller limitations so even a 9200 is probably twiddling its thumbs half the time, no matter how fast the CPU is.