800 mhz upgrade |
September, 24, 2002 10:54 PM |
tbuckley |
Anyone care to comment on how their sonnett 800 mhz upgrade is working? Wondering if its worth the money. |
. |
RE: 800 mhz upgrade |
October, 04, 2002 8:16 PM |
macman |
. |
I would have to say that under 10.1.5, I am running this card with 1024 or (mostly OWC) EDO ram with no problems. All are interleaved with no issues. I did have some difficulty keeping the caches enabled through reboots, but that's fixed now. Once the Trio software comes out, I will install 10.2, too. Stephen |
. |
RE: 800 mhz upgrade |
October, 04, 2002 7:18 PM |
marcush |
. |
I have to say that I strongly disagree also. I'm still testing but I don't see that there is a major problem running OS X on our old machines. I know I'm pushing limits with QE but the results I saw with Final Cut Pro and QE enabled were not unexpected because I'd read that that would be the case. I merely wanted to see for myself. As far as the game crash goes I'm sure I'll find out what causes that in due course. I am very pleased that I can still be productive with this machine and have had no stability problems or complaints about speed. |
. |
RE: 800 mhz upgrade |
October, 04, 2002 12:31 AM |
paul_findley |
. |
Reply to Michael587. I don't know for sure, but I think the age of my firewire/ usb combo card was a problem. Chips were slower two years ago. I suspect you'll be OK with one of the newer combo cards, especially with USB 2.0. After installing the owc new, dedicated firewire card, the owc pre-oxford911 external 40GB 5400rpm firewire drive started freezing, so I bought a new ACOMDATA 120GB 7200rpm firewire drive, and it seems to work fine. I'm about to check the warranty on the 1 year+ owc drive and see if I can get some satisfaction. Note to everyone having problems: The 800 Mhz card is VERY picky about ram, esp. in OS X 10.2.x. It will tolerate two owc 4k refresh 128MB modules (uninterleaved), but not 4 of them (crashes on boot or during applications). So I'm maxed out at 256MB, unless I decide to try some 64MB 2k refresh modules (more money for less ram per module). The card is definitely more touchy in OS X than OS 9, but with the new firewire, and the limit on 4k refresh ram, I seem to be stable in X finally. |
. |
RE: 800 mhz upgrade |
October, 03, 2002 8:40 PM |
michael587 |
. |
I haven't done any timings, but my 7600 with 800 mhz Sonnet running 10.2.1 feels really quick -- every bit as quick as the emac. Haven't had a crash yet. Got Cocoa eFax installed and it works on either of my old modems through the serial port. I don't know if OS9 is faster or not since I have no further interest in that old technology. It feels so good I'm going to get a Radeon 7000 card and a Firewire card and use it as my primary workhorse machine. I'll report back later in the month as to how well it holds up. Mike |
. |
RE: 800 mhz upgrade |
October, 03, 2002 8:03 PM |
mjohnson1 |
. |
I have to disagree, webmaster814. My card is rock solid running X 10.2.1 on a PowertowerPro. No problems whatsoever, either with the install or running the OS. The speed improvement over my previous card, an XLR8 G4 450 is quite substantial. Yes, OS 9 runs quite fast with this card as well, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with X and the 800 card. Specs - PTP 200, MacOS X 10.2.1, Sonnet G4 800, 832MB RAM. PCI slot order is as follows: Acard ATA/66 with 2 drives connected, MacAlly FW/USB card and in slot 6 a Rage Orion. |
. |
RE: 800 mhz upgrade |
October, 03, 2002 4:12 PM |
webmaster814 |
. |
ok im going to have to say this again. I would not recommend anyone buying this card who has intensions of using X. I know that many of you need and live for X, I am one of them, but a PCI based machine and X do not simply mix. The card under 9.2.2 is amazing. Scores are equal to that of a quicksilver G4. The machine I tested against the quicksilver had 1.0gig ram, ATA133 with IBM120GXP 7200RPM HD, and it was a PowerMac 9600/350. ONCE AGAIN UNDER 9 THE CARD ROCKS UNDER X IT REALLY SUCKS. Michael Stay in 9 and you will see the elegence of the Macintosh |
. |
RE: 800 mhz upgrade |
October, 03, 2002 1:28 PM |
marcush |
. |
Forgot. My specs are PTP 225, MacOS X 10.2.1, Sonnet G4 800, 768MB RAM. PCI slot order is as follows: Acard ATA/133 with 4 drives connected, Initio Miles SCSI UW with 2 drives connected, Ratoc Firewire/USB2.0, Macsense 10/100 Ethernet, ATI Radeon Mac Edition 32MB (original Radeon), 3dfx Voodoo 5 5500. |
. |
RE: 800 mhz upgrade |
October, 03, 2002 1:23 PM |
marcush |
. |
I had unexpected problems when I installed the G4 800 also. I'm sure they arose because I had not installed the Sonnet cache enabler software beforehand. I was trying to see if Powerlogix G3/G4 Cache profiler and Altivec enabler would work with their L3 Cache enabler extension. In short, I rebooted or shut down one too many times and for five days my Power Tower Pro would not boot at all. Not even with the original processor. It's all in the "800Mhz" thread a few pages back in this forum. Suffice it to say that after much hand wringing and posting and two calls to Sonnet tech support I finally got the machine up again with a PRAM rescue boot disk that they usually ship with cards destined for B&W G3's. Since then I have had no problems. The only thing I'm still experimenting with is cache enabling software. I've switched back and forth between the Sonnet cache enabler and Powerlogix Cache Control X. I've been trying to determine, which if either, is faster. I've found that Xbench shows that the Sonnet enabler software gives a higher overall score than the Powerlogix software, but the Powerlogix software gives higher scores in some areas than the Sonnet software. Xbench uses, I believe, a QS G4 800 as its base configuration. It's score is 100 on a scale of 0-100. My Power Tower Pro comes in with a score of 55 with the Sonnet cache enabler and 53 with the Powerlogix cache enabler. I don't discern any difference in system responsiveness between the two cache enablers so it's been difficult to choose one to stick with. Powerlogix has a slight edge because it includes command line tools for monitoring and setting the cache. As part of this evaluation I've enabled Quartz Extreme to see which gives me the best performance. I tried doing a batch capture in Final Cut Pro with QE enabled and found that the demands on the PCI bus by QE were too much to get good capture results. The video quality was visibly lower and the sound dropped out frequently. There were also lots of dropped frames. The other Apps I wanted to test QE were games. I have not gotten very far with games yet. I'm stuck right now because I'm trying to troubleshoot Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. I've found that since updating to 10.2.1, with or without QE enabled that it freezes my machine within a few minutes. This also happens with either cache enabler. The same thing happens in OS 9.1. Interestingly Return to Castle Wolfenstein does not. I've not read any reports of an incompatibility between Elite Force and 10.2.1 so this is something of a mystery. The only difference with the machine now are the Sonnet G4 800 and the addition of a Macsense 10/100 ethernet card. I don't think that QE is the disruptive factor here because the game seemed to play just as well, if not better. So, I'll try removing the ethernet card next. Just a few observations. |
. |
RE: 800 mhz upgrade |
October, 03, 2002 10:09 AM |
nct |
. |
My main after work task for the past week has been to try and bring up a Sonnet 800 mhz card on a 9600/200+OSX 10.2.1. I finally got it running to a point where it doesn't hang my system within the first 5 minutes of Aqua running. Time will tell if it stays stable. I don't wan't to disparage the card too much, since the problem could have been with my set-up/install proceedure, but it definitely gave me a lot more trouble than I expected. I'll summarize what I did for anyone who is interested: Initial setup: 9600/200MP w/Sonnet G3 400Mhz 310MB RAM/Interleaved Original 4GB internal SCSI drive with 10.2.1 via XPF and PowerLogix Cache Control to enable caches. PCI (from the top) Empty Apple 10/100 Ethernet card Adaptec Firewire Card with 2 60GB each on its own controller Belkin USB card, (which I think causes the "dead on poweron" phenomenon) Empty ATI Rage Pro Orion 1. Shut down computer and swapped old card for new. 2. Pressed CUDA switch, zapped PRAM on restart. 3. Machine hung on restart. 4. I installed Sonnet Tuneup software over XPF, but that made things worse. 5. The exact chronology of the next six days has become a blur, but these are the main points: A. I disconnected the FW drives since they contained my user data B. I installed 9.1 on an external SCSI drive and installed all the tools I needed for bring-up. (Sonnet X 1.0 software, Sonnet 1.2.5 Updater, Sonnet X TuneUp, XPostFacto 2.2.2, the version of Startup Disk needed by Sonnet X, Powerlogix CacheControl) C. Booted 9.1 and tried the Sonnet software. The 1.2.5 updater would not find the 1.0 package to update. The "documentation" (i.e. a 1 paragraph README file,) does not match the way the updater actually works; it doesn't let you choose the package to update, it looks for a package, (doesn't tell you which) and then aborts somewhere in the middle, presumably because it can't find it, even though it's in the same folder. D. Tried to install Jag with Sonnet 1.0 Installer, but it failed as I expected. E. It took me about 3 or 4 tries to install OSX 10.0.0; there were various hangs along the process. Eventually, I got it installed, but it would hang at startup with the Boot Panel showing "Starting Directory Services". F. Trying to update to Jag from this state did not work, even with XPF 2.2.2. G. Wiped the drive clean. Tried to install Jag with XPF 2.2.2 but I kept getting failures at the end of disk 1. A white alert box would pop up telling me I had to manually restart the system but on restart, OSX would either fail to load, (Null symbol on screen,) or it would try to start, but would eventually hang with a garbled screen. 6. Finally got fed-up. I replaced the G4 with G3; Held the CUDA down for 30 seconds, zapped the PRAM, and booted off the external 9.1 disk. I installed Jaguar using XPF, I installed flawlessly. Ran software update to get 10.2.1 etc. 7. Swapped the G4 for the G3 card again. No CUDA pressing, no PRAM zapping. 8. I had considered that the Firewire card may have caused the initial hangs after I first installed the card, so I kept the drives offline. 9. System came up, and I was able to login as my admin account. 10. I downloaded a new version of the PowerLogix Cache control, but when the browser was about to launch StuffitExpander, the system hung again. 11. This time, I turned off and disconnected the external SCSI drive. 12. Rebooted; Ran Stuffit Expander manually without. Installed Cache Control. 13. Rebooted. Cache Control shows L3 cache enabled. Plugged in Firewire drives. They came up, and I was able to login using my normal account on the Firewire. A week ago, it would have hung at the part where 3 icons start to bounce in the dock as my Login apps start-up. This time it didn't; it was up all night (just screensaver,) and I ran it lightly this morning, and it seemed stable. I'm keeping my fingers crossed now. As to speed: I didn't know what to expect, but I'm not overly impressed with it over the G3. I'll reserve judgement until after I crunch some DV tapes to MPEG-1, which is the original justification for it. Sorry for the length of this. Hopefully someone else will find it useful. |
. |
RE: 800 mhz upgrade |
September, 30, 2002 6:58 PM |
marcush |
. |
I have a Ratoc FW/USB2.0 combo card and it works fine. It actually has faster throughput under OS X than OS 9. |
. |
RE: 800 mhz upgrade |
September, 29, 2002 7:48 PM |
michael587 |
. |
Question for paul_findley: Is your USB/firewire combo drive still a problem if you are only using the firewire port? I ask because I only have room for one card, but I only occasionally need one or the other, never both at the same time. Mike |
. |
RE: 800 mhz upgrade |
September, 26, 2002 3:44 AM |
maury |
. |
hello pm 9600 / sonnet 800 / 1.3gb ram / ati radeon ( 3 screens connected )/ firewire-usb card / ide card with 2-hd's connected / os 10.1.5 the card is working fine no problem during the inst. and it rocks only an external dvd player makes some trouble i see it ( dvd insert ) but i can look dvd's that someone know wath that i can do why i can't add software to see dvd films that i need a dvd card? |
. |
RE: 800 mhz upgrade |
September, 25, 2002 6:55 PM |
marcush |
. |
It's working great in my Power Tower Pro. I've been using the Powerlogix Cache Control X 2.1b4 because I like the monitoring utilities it includes. Sonnet has nothing to report your processor status under OS X. I tried using the Sonnet X tuneup but only for a few hours because I did not see any difference between it and the Powerlogix enabler. I think I'll try it again though because I've had Quartz Extreme enabled for the past week and I want to see if it speeds things up with QE enabled. The Sonnet card also does definitely enable RAM to be interleaved again and it solves the six-slot G4 incompatability. |
. |
RE: 800 mhz upgrade |
September, 25, 2002 3:27 AM |
paul_findley |
. |
Works fine, except that firewiredirect.com's combo card (firewire + usb1.1) can't keep up with it. Often locks up when I access my firewire HD, and also looses contact with the USB mouse. I partially solved the problem by installing an IOGEAR USB 2.0 2-port card and attaching all USB devices to it. That seems to have given the firewire part of the old card a little more breathing room, but it still threatens to hang occasionally. Final fix will be to get a dedicated, newer firewire card. After this experience, I will probably stay away from combo cards. Mouse now works fine on IOGEAR's USB card. Also, some older memory modules weren't seen, even after deinterleaving, so I had to remove them. The OWC 128MB modules seem to work OK. I haven't dared tried to interleave them again, as I had them with my old G3 w/o problems. I ran the Sonnet X tuneup (free) on top of an xPostFacto install, and lost the ability to boot classic. Reinstalling the kernel ext from xPostFacto brings back classic, and still leaves the Sonnet cache enabler in place, but I don't know if performance is optimal. The Sonnet web site mistakenly says there cresendo OS 9 software is OS X compatible, but all it does is install a cache enabling extension + their metronome software in OS 9. The OWC review also seems to have this wrong (at least the first version that I read). X tuneup is the way to go for X. Powerlogix Cache Control X (latest beta 4) seems to work, too, but the Sonnet tune up might be doing more, as peformance seems a little better. The ideal way for all around compatibility w/o taking chances would be X tune up on top of a Sonnet install, but who wants to spend $30 for the Sonnet X installer? |
|
|