From: Ian Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 22:23:59 -0400
Hello everyone, I used to be on this list a year or so ago and now I'm back. I have a Mac IIsi that I loaned to a friend, and now that I'm getting it back this week, I would like to make some improvements.
I would be interested in using something like the Sonnet Presto 040, but by the way it looks, that would take up my only place for a NuBus card. I need a NuBus ethernet card in order to network with my other Mac and access the internet, and I would like to know for sure whether or not using an upgrade card like the Presto 040 will keep me from installing my ethernet card. If so, what are some other upgrade options that I could look into that don't prevent the addition of a NuBus card? Who knows the pros/cons of chipping the system to 25MHz? This is not a necessity, but just something that I would like to do.
Thanks in advance, and I'm glad to be back!
If you are set on upgrading the IIsi, then I suggest you look for Daystar's right-angle adapter for the IIsi. It plugs into the IIsi PDS slot and provides one slot for a Daystar CPU upgrade and one slot as a pass-through PDS slot. You won't be able to use the Apple Nubus adapter with it (the NuBus slot would be pointing into the ground), but it will let you plug in something like Asante's MacCon card for the SE/30 and IIsi which provides ethernet to those two machines by plugging into the PDS slot.
There may have been more than one version of the Daystar adapter, so shop carefully. You want the one that provides one IIci equivalent slot for the upgrade and one PDS pass-through slot. I don't know if the upgrade slot will work with the Sonnet upgrades. You might need to find one of the Daystar upgrades.
There are no real down sides to clock chipping the IIsi to 25 or even 27 MHz. The chip set on the board is the same as on the IIci. You will not be overstressing it to run it at the speed at which it was designed to work. If you remove the original oscillator, as opposed to using some kind of clip, then the downside is the potential for damaging your logic board in the process of desoldering the oscillator. If you do remove the oscillator, install a socket, so that you can easily test the 50 and 55 MHz (IIsi runs at half the speed of the oscillator) oscillators without further soldering (other than the socket).
However, upgrading a IIsi is sort of like beating yourself with a hammer. Unless you're dead set on that machine for reasons not subject to logical debate, I suggest you get a IIci. The foot print is not significantly larger, it lacks audio input, but it has three NuBus slots, a PDS slot, twice the RAM capacity and power supplies will always be easier to find because they were used in the IIcx, IIci, IIvx, IIvi, Q700 and PM7100.
Jeff Walther
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