My S900 has a pretty good story too. It came into my possession at a party, following the comment "We were just going to throw it away". The case was pretty messed up, no bezel or side door and full of dust. I didn't feel like expending the money and effort to repair that case, so I bought it a massive black Chieftec full-tower server case online for $50 shipped. I discovered much to my surprise that I had a dual-processor CPU daughtercard, a DayStar nPower 360 (dual 180MHz 604e), after checking the Apple System Profiler and finding the statement "Processors: 2", thinking ASP was lying, and then closely inspecting the card and noticing that it did in fact have two processors on it. It had 64MB on it when I got it, and I fed it the leftover 64MB from when I upped the RAM in my 6200->6500 (It's a Power Macintosh 6500 logic board in a Performa 6200CD case, which makes for one small 250MHz 603e machine with a Voodoo2) for a total of 128. It's running OS9.2.2 on an ancient Conner 2GB SCSI drive pulled from one of my friends' dead Micron workstations. As far as upgrades go, I recently purchased a SCSI card off eBay, an Adaptec PowerDomain 2940U2W cards for $25 shipped. It's a beast of a card, one channel of internal/external Low Voltage Differential (LVD) SCSI2 (15 devices maximum, 80MB/sec burst transfer) and one channel of Fast/Wide/Narrow SCSI2 (15 devices max on the Wide connector, 7 on the Narrow connector (it's the same bus), 40MB/sec on the Wide connector and 20MB/sec on the Narrow connector. There's a bunch of Seagate Cheetahs and Barracudas on eBay right now, so I'm probably going to add a couple of fast hard drives at some point. I'm trying to obtain the firmware for the GeForce FX 5200 cards shipping in new G5's, since I have a PC version that's PCI (from PNY) and a warranty I can't void ($20 extra for 2 years at CompUSA). Some people have had mixed results with flashing GeForce 4 MX PCI cards with the AGP firmware, so there's at least a precedent for this sort of thing working.
>snip >Instead there is some strange NIC and serial/appletalk plug on a pinned riser card. >Anyone know what this thing is? >/snip It's officially called an Apollo card, but you can think of it like as an ATX form card similar to the one bundled with some late-model AT-style x86 motherboards (a little card with USB, PS/2 mouse, IrDA, features not found in the average AT case). The Apollo card has a 10baseT twisted pair RJ45 jack and an AAUI network connector for old school AppleTalk networking goodness. The AAUI connector can work with an external 10baseT bridge, but AFAIK you can only use the AAUI or the RJ-45 by themselves, never both at the same time. I use an external Farallon EtherWave with mine, because I have limited ethernet port space and you can daisy chain another computer off the EtherWave. The two other two connectors on the card are serial ports, not sure if they're GeoPorts or not (think they are). -Drew B -- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------
