Hello again everyone! Again, thanks for all the feedback and suggestions.
Sooner or later, when you keep banging your head against a wall, you reach a point of saying "f*%k it. It's not worth the trouble." I am about at that point. I have spent almost all my free time for the last 2 days farting around with this thing. As you might gather from the above, I have not succeeded in solving the problem. I plugged the molex splitter into the optical drive power connector, and disconnected one of the 4 hard drives. This did not solve the problem. However, using the optical bay power lead made for a more efficient cable run to the 9800 card, so I will keep that if I get the card working properly. I then disconnected another hard drive and removed the unused PCI card. Still no joy. Thinking the problem might be driver/software related, I installed the August '95 ATI ROM update. No effect on the problem. Then I taped the infamous 3 & 11 pins. I double and triple checked with a magnifying glass to make sure those pins were completely covered, and no other pins were. This too did not solve the problem. So, I am down to the Leopard boot drive (an OWC 115 GB SSD), and my SCSI raid set (2 cheetah LVD drives). I assume that the SSD draws less power than a standard drive? I am down to 2 pci cards: a USB 2.0 card, and the ATTO UL3D that drives the RAID set. The only thing to try, as Valter, Mac User #330250, and Wayne have suggested, is to remove the last things - the SCSI RAID, the UL3D, and the USB 2.0 card, and see what happens. The thing is, even if that worked, I don't *want* to run the machine that way. I want my RAID, and you pretty much need USB 2.0. The fact is, I ran all of the above with the stock 9000 card and an Apple ADC 23 inch monitor, without a hitch. For a while I even ran a 5th hard drive in the machine with no problems. Now that monitor draws its power from the machine. Wouldn't the absence of the ADC monitor drawing power be some sort of compensation for the power needs of the 9800? The 9800 must be some kind of monster power hog if it can't get enough power to run when I'm only running 2 PCI cards and 3 hard drives (one of them an SSD). And another thing, another "con" to the whole project: When I do not have an ADC monitor plugged in to the MDD, the fans do not spin down to a slower speed after startup, and cycle according to use. They run full blast constantly, giving the well-known "MDD wind tunnel effect". This happens even when I connect the stock 9000 card to a non-ADC monitor using the DVI port. This is very annoying to me, and I'm not sure if I could put up with that indefinitely. It seems as though the MDD really *likes* having an ADC monitor connected to it. So, I am back to the stock 9000 card for now. I have to be away for a couple of days, so will have to come back to this when I return. Thanks again, Rob J. On Sunday, December 9, 2012 6:13:13 PM UTC-5, Valter Viglietti wrote: > > Il giorno 08/12/12 19:42, frrob ha scritto: > > > As far as power goes in general, I *do* have four drives. But I have one > > empty PCI slot. So I'm not sure if I'm maxing out power or not. > IMHO, four drives, three PCI cards (your MDD should have 4 slots) AND the > Radeon 9800... Equals too much power for the standard 360W (or 400W) power > supply. > No surprise it could be "chocking"... > > As someone else said, try with just one HD connected (and the 9800 > connected > to the optical drive power line). > If it works... You know where the problem is. :-) > > > -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
