At 10:27 -0800 11/20/2002, David R wrote: >I was reading this interesting question on an XLR8yourmac page to UMAX from >this guy named 'Jeff W.' about which slots to put two Twin Turbo cards in an >s900. In which they responded the bottom four slots. > >> My Question to Umax: >> My question regards PCI cards and which slot to use. I have seen many >> discussions which recommend putting various cards in the upper two >>slots. I've >> heard explanations that range from "it won't work otherwise" to "performance >> is better". >> >> I have two IxMicro Twin Turbo TT128M4's and two Adaptec >>PowerDomain 2940UW's. >> Obviously, all four of them cannot go in the upper two slots. snip snip > >> Thank you for your time and attention, >> Jeff Walther > >My question here is (maybe to Jeff), is there any level of Video Performance >boost by having two TT128M8 cards installed at the same time? I have both >the Ultimate Rez and the original Twin Turbo so I'd also want to make sure >there was no compatibility issue. I'm only running one 19" monitor, but if >the system can take advantage of the second card to boost its overall >performance, well I have a second card that I would like to install in an >extra slot. Does the system utilize the memory on a second card if no >monitor is attached?
Some background: That was part of an email I sent to Umax technical support back when there was still such a thing and I was a very fresh S900 owner. Yes, their recommendation was to put the SCSI cards in the top slots. (Much of that info on Mike's page is outdated by stuff we've figured out here. Occasionally I think about sending him an update to all his notes on the S900, but time, time time. :-) ) However, I eventually worked up the time and gumption to do a bunch of testing and what I found is that both the 2940UW and the Twin Turbo are very well behaved in any slot in the S900. I also found that Copy Bits tests in MacBench 5 are about four times as fast with the Twin Turbo in the upper slots as they are in when the TT is in the lower slots. Plus, the 2940UW only looses a few percent in performance in the lower slots. Keep in mind that this testing was with the original PPC604e/200 CPU and that a fast G3 might change a bottleneck somewhere. So my conclusion was that Umax had it backwards and the Twin Turbos belonged in the upper slots. However, in their defense, I think their advice was based on general principals rather than the specific cards in my deck. Back then the Ult. Rez. was still several hundred dollars and it was considered a great deal that OEM Apple Twin Turbo cards were available for $95. No, there's no advantage to multiple TT cards unless you wish to run multiple monitors. I've been using a dual monitor setup since my IIci days, so I wasn't about to switch fully to the S900 until I had two video cards in it. As it turned out, it took me a few years after that as the S900 laid on it's side with the case open for all kinds of testing and my old Power Computing Power 120 continued in service as my main machine. My experience with the Ult. Rez. in particular is that it will not work properly in the lower slots unless you disable one of the extensions. However, if you disable that extension (forgot it's name, but if someone will list the three choices I can probably pick it out), the acceleration of the card is also disabled and it becomes much slower. The specific symptoms I experienced with the Ult. Rez. was that it was okay in a lower slot until you try to change resolutions or color depth. Upon trying to change either of those, in either the ixMicro CP or the Apple Monitors CP, the machine would hard freeze including cursor movement. If you disable the extension that provides the acclereration, the problem goes away. It sounds like a software bug that probably would have been pretty easy to fix if ixMicro hadn't evaporated too soon. It sure would be nice if these people would public source their drivers when they sink. So, if you are desperate to have an Ult. Rez. in the lower slots, you can do it thusly. Anytime you want to change resolution or color depth, disable the guilty extension and reboot. Then make your changes. Then re-enable the extension and reboot. This would be a pain, but it would make it possible to keep the Ult. Rez. in a lower slot and still change settings if you really needed to. I'm not sure what would happen if a game tried to change the color depth for you. It would probably hard freeze, is my guess. 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! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> SuperMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; 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/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
