OS X Success with Sonnet 450/G4 |
August, 18, 2002 4:35 PM |
Tony.Scaminaci |
OWC finally swapped out my questionable XLR8 G4 card for a Sonnet G4/450 and my 9500 has been stable ever since. They weren't all that happy to do the swap, stating explicitly that XLR8 was out of business and they couldn't get another card. I told them I'd be willing to swap for a Powerlogix or Sonnet card and pay whatever difference there was, but they seemed to be hesitant to do that and told me they would have to discuss it after I returned the XLR8 card. To speed up their "discussions", my wife and son drove over to the OWC office and did the swap in person which is probably the only reason they did it so fast. Anyway, it's interesting to note that Gauge Pro's moving memory indication is significantly lower with the Sonnet card. It appears that this is a function of the cache control software. The XLR8 software (which refuses to work with the Sonnet G4) was reporting 80 MB/s moving memory witht the XLR8 card installed under OS 9. With the Sonnet G4 card, I can only use Powerlogix's G3/G4 Cache Profiler or the Sonnet Cache enabler. Using the Powerlogix enabler, moving memory drops to 70 MB/s, but with Sonnet's cache enabler, it drops even further to 63 MB/s. I think that these lower figures have something to do with stability. Maybe the XLR8 card wasn't flaky at all - rather, the XLR8 cache software was pushing the card too fast for the 9500's bus speed. The machine is now unconditionally stable under both OS 9 and OS X with either the Powerlogix or Sonnet cache enabler installed. I'm using the Powerlogix enabler under OS 9 but am using the Sonnet enabler under X (more on that later). Haven't had one freeze since I put the Sonnet G4 card into the machine 3 days ago. Should get interesting as I attempt to put back in the previous 128M DIMMs that I thought were making the machine unstable with the XLR8 card. So far, I'm using Sonnet's G4 Tuneup for OS X as the cache enabler. I tried Powerlogix's enabler, but I couldn't get meaningful readings from it under OS X (e.g. CPU temp of 6 billion degrees C, really a negative temp reading). Also, enabling the backside cache seemed to hold until I rebooted and then Cache Profiler would state that it was off again. I couldn't get the settings to stick between reboots. So, I installed the Sonnet enabler - you have to be root to install this software! It has no user interface, but I can see the hex settings it's providing during bootup in verbose mode. There's no way to change them but I can feel the increase in speed now that the cache is on after every boot. I tried the Powerlogix enabler prior to upgrading to 10.1.5. I think I'll try it again once I install all of the Apple updates after 10.1.5 (simply a matter of moving the Sonnet extension out of the /system/library/extensions folder temporarily). Cache Profiler is great in that it provides a deinstall script if things don't go well and I have to go back to the Sonnet enabler. One other thing to note. Installing Sonnet's G4 Tuneup for OS X is troublesome. First, you MUST be root to get the installer to complete - an admin account is not sufficient. Second. the first time you launch it, it quits without doing anything. However, launching it a second time lets it run to completion (as long as your logged in as root). Finally, the installation corrupts the settings that XPF uses to boot OS X, so the next reboot kernel panics with the error that no driver for AAPL, 9500 can be found. The fix is to reinstall the kernel extensions (and I did BootX too for the heck of it) and then all is well. |
. |
RE: OS X Success with Sonnet 450/G4 |
August, 20, 2002 11:06 PM |
Tony.Scaminaci |
. |
Britney, The Gauge Pro readings are directly related to the processor speed, the type of processor, speed of your main bus, whether your DIMMs are interleaved or not, and possibly speed of the backside cache as well. I haven't been able to quantify the exact correlation between these factors. However, given experiments on one card (Sonnet G4/450), the XLR8 software gave the fastest results near 80 MB/s but it crashed the machine. So I tried Powerlogix's G3/G4 Cache Profiler 1.5 and it shows 70 MB/s. Finally, I tried Sonnet's enabler that came with the card and it showed 63 MB/s. Therefore, I'm sticking with G3/G4 Cache Profiler since it's the fastest enabler that's stable under OS 9. By the way, I removed Sonnet's cache .kext file and installed Cache Control X 1.2 under 10.1.5 while logged in as root. It installed fine but when I tried to turn on the settings, I could set the backside cache speed but attempting to turn on the cache (which disables to off following installation for some reason), gave me a permanent spinning beach ball so I killed System Prefs after 15 minutes. Not knowing what state the cache was in under X, I just rebooted and re-logged in as root. This time the CPU temp readings were correct but the cache was still off. So I turned it back on again which didn't cause the spinning beach ball this time. Finally, I rebooted one more time, logged in as root, and the cache settings were now all perfect (had already noticed the increase in Aqua speed). I then logged out and back in under my normal admin account and couldn't run Cache Control anymore. Guess you not only have to be root to install it, but root to run it as well. My personal opinion is that the Powerlogix utils are the best and most stable under OS 9 and X. Let's see what happens when we install 10.2 :-) |
. |
RE: OS X Success with Sonnet 450/G4 |
August, 20, 2002 3:21 PM |
brfransen |
. |
Tony, That is really curious. Gauge Pro for me only shows about 47Mb/s. Now I only have a G3/450 with the XLR8 software so that may have something to do with the difference, I don't know. I will try the Powerlogix software and see what I get. I guess it could also have something to do with the quality of the memory. Do you know exactly what it components affect this number? Britney |
|
|