At 21:02 -0700 04/17/2002, Stephen Nelson wrote: >I just received from my father's old Umax Supermac that he does not use >anymore. It has one 200Mhz 604e and a secondary 180Mhz 604e CPU, 96Mb RAM, >and 6Gb HD space, and the standard twin turbo video card. I was wondering if >there is anything that I can get, that will not break the bank, to make the >computer run smoother. Currently it is setup for a dual boot Mac OS 8.1 and >BeOS, but I am looking for a CPU upgrade maybe? I am not too familiar with >the Mac side of hardware since I have played with Intel based stuff most of >the time..
There are several upgrades available that will improve aspects of your system, but all of them together would definitely break the bank. What you want or need depends on your goals for the system and what problems, if any, that you are currently having. If you are having stability problems, I would suggest removing the Secondary CPU (you'll need to put three jumpers on the cable connector at the top of the Primary CPU, the three sets of pins toward the front of the machine), update your hard disk drivers, and reinstall your operating system. Unless you know that your father recently did a fresh install and that he has up to date disk drivers on the machine. Moving to OS 8.6 or 9.1 (or back to 7.6.1 :-) ) would probably also be an improvement, but there is a fair bit of individual preference in that. OS 8.1 is probably just fine. Keep in mind that the CDROM drive that came with the S900 is not supported by Apple's CDROM Extension, so you'll want to save whatever extensions/control panels is/are running your CDROM (or reinstall it from the S900/Umax CD if you have it). If you get a CPU upgrade, there are G3 and G4 based CPU cards from a little over $100 on up. 500 MHz G3 CPU cards have been appearing recently for about $200 or a bit more. A new CPU will increase the performance of most functions on your machine. RAM can often be found now at ~$25 per 128 MB DIMM for our machines, in case your usage requires more RAM. There are 8 DIMM sockets on the motherboard and 16 MB of RAM soldered to the motherboard. The DIMMs needed were not used on the PC side for any machine, as far as I know. So if you don't know what RAM to get, ask. PC66, PC100 and PC 133 will ruin the motherboard and the DIMM if you manage to install it. The notch placement should make that impossible, but I've seen people get PC66 DIMMs into these sockets. I have the salvaged toasted motherboard and ruined DIMM here to prove it.... You may have an older slower hard drive in there (though I don't think that 6 GB is a stock drive, so it may be faster). The S900 has two built-in SCSI busses. Bus 0 is a Fast SCSI-2 (10 MB/s) bus with an internal ribbon cable connector only. Bus 1 is an unenhanced SCSI-2 (5 MB/s) bus with both an internal ribbon cable connector and an external DB-25 connector. BTW, that DB25 connector is not a parallel port, it's the SCSI port--just in case. The stock SCSI drives usually managed about 6 - 8 MB/s so they weren't even up to the performace potential of the SCSI bus. An ATA interface PCI card and one of the new ATA hard drives will greatly boost your hard drive performance. Even if you have a fast CPU, hard drive performance (getting stuff off the drive to the CPU) can bottleneck your machine. Of course, you could also buy a fast SCSI interface card and a blazing SCSI drive to go with it, but you'll pay twice as much for about half the storage capacity--but you'll probably get somewhat faster performance. You need an ATA card made for the Mac. The firmware (BIOS in PC parlance) is different on the Mac cards, even though the hardware is the same as some of the PC cards. Of course, an ATA card and hard drive is another $150 - $200. Finally, the Twin Turbo is a good yeoman video card, but there are much faster choices on the market. I would avoid the Ult. Rez. card (successor to the TT) just because it has problems in the lower four PCI slots of the S900 (buggy driver problem). But it is available for $40. Unless you are going to do some intense graphics work or play 3D games (TT has no 3D acceleration), the TT card will probably be fine for your purposes. Really finally, the lower four slots of the S900 are behind a PCI-PCI Bridge and this older generation of Apple's PCI implementation does not properly support hierarchies of PPB. So, cards in the lower slots usually work fine, unless you add a card which has its own PCI-PCI Bridge creating a hierarchy of two PCI-PCI Bridges. So avoid things like dual channel SCSI cards, SCSI/firewire cards and Firewire/USB cards in the lower slots. Some multi-function video cards (monitor/video capture) also have problems. You've only got two upper slots, so you must be careful about how you allocate them. The Twin Turbo is very well behaved and works fine in the lower slots, but it's Copy Bits performance is much faster in the upper slots. Jeff Walther -- SuperMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | Service & Replacement Parts [EMAIL PROTECTED] | & CDRWs on Sale! | SPECIAL SM LIST PRICES - 24x Bootable SCSI CDROM $39.99, Umax Processors $19.99 PowerSupplies from C500/C600 $49.99 J700/S900 $79.99 <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> SuperMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/list.shtml> Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/supermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
