Help me pimp out a Graphite

[z970]

@r6mile For your 9700; whether it's useful or not, this thread may provide you with some information to help you avoid the problems I encountered when flashing this card ...

Saving a Bricked Radeon 9700 Pro Mac Edition

Before I pack this endeavor up and hang my head in defeat after multiple days of stressing over this fiasco, I wanted to get all your opinions on what to do to try to resurrect this card, as I've seen many instances of our forum's members coming up with insanely clever solutions that have never...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[r6mile]

@r6mile For your 9700; whether it's useful or not, this thread may provide you with some information to help you avoid the problems I encountered when flashing this card ...

Saving a Bricked Radeon 9700 Pro Mac Edition

Before I pack this endeavor up and hang my head in defeat after multiple days of stressing over this fiasco, I wanted to get all your opinions on what to do to try to resurrect this card, as I've seen many instances of our forum's members coming up with insanely clever solutions that have never...

forums.macrumors.com

Thank you, yes I came across it - I wonder if it's any different because mine is the non-Pro version? I've just gone with what it says in the Macelite website, which says that it should be easily compatible. In any case, it only cost me £15 so I'm willing to take a gamble!

 

[z970]

@r6mile I believe the only differences between the 9700 TX, non-Pro, and Pro versions are core and memory clock speeds, meaning there is effectively no difference between them. The 9600 and 9800 however, are of course different stories.

For your first attempt, I would suggest flashing it from a Mac with Graphiccelerator in the unlikely event that it actually works. If it does however, that will have made for a far easier and more straightforward process than fumbling about with DOS. Otherwise, you will have to resort to fumbling about with DOS.

Mine cost $13.

 

[r6mile]

@r6mile I believe the only differences between the 9700 TX, non-Pro, and Pro versions are core and memory clock speeds, meaning there is effectively no difference between them. The 9600 and 9800 however, are of course different stories.

For your first attempt, I would suggest flashing it from a Mac with Graphiccelerator in the unlikely event that it actually works. If it does however, that will have made for a far easier and more straightforward process than fumbling about with DOS. Otherwise, you will have to resort to fumbling about with DOS.

Mine cost $13.

Will report on how I get on! I don't have a PC to do this on, so hopefully I manage on one of my Powermacs in OSX.

 

[r6mile]

I used a small set of fans harvested from an old maddog hdd cooler to help move air around my cpus & gpu in my QS.

View attachment 945925

I’m not sold on the absolute necessity of them but it does help. I also believe that replacing the old 120mm fan with a high quality new fan like a noctua really helps with cage vibration.

Thank you, this is very helpful.

Compared to the MDD the Quicksilver seems pretty quiet, so I'm not yet convinced that I need to replace the stock fans with something quieter.
In any case, I've looked through the specs for the two QS fans on Japamacs (http://www.jcsenterprises.com/Japamacs_Page/Cooling_and_Fans.html), and am struggling to find Noctua fans that match the noise and output of the original ones, unless I am calculating something wrong. The ones that Japamacs recommend for the Quicksilver don't seem to be sold anymore.

I'm leaning towards keeping the machine without an optical drive or hard drives for now - just a single SSD - so that should help with airflow. But you are not the first to recommend additional fans, so an idea might be to add an additional quiet Noctua fan (without a sensor, as there are no sensors left, so it would be spinning at a constant RPM), and mount it where the optical drive would be. Though I also have a few small fans lying around scavenged from an Xserve, so I could try to make those work.

 

[1042686]

Noctua NF-F12 iPPC-2000s get good reviews @ 2000rpm and operate at 29dba vs the oem sensflow @ 38dba. It does push the psu a tad harder using 6w though & 78cfm.

They still make the recommended 120mm cooler master R4-L2R-20CK-GP

Us.coolermaster.com/product/detail/cooling/standard-fan/blue-led-silent-fan-120mm.html

Looks like the MC are sleeve bearing & the Noctua are high speed SSO2 bearings so will be louder but last longer.

 

[r6mile]

Yes, APM. I don't see why it wouldn't work for installing OS 9.

So I've tried both a Universal 9.2.2 image and the QS 2002 OS9.2 Restore CD image (both from Macintosh Garden), and while I can boot from both from a restored image on a partition of the FW drive, I then get the floppy with a question mark icon and nothing happens. Any ideas on how to proceed with installing OS9? Any images that people have got working on a Quicksilver?

 

[1042686]

So I've tried both a Universal 9.2.2 image and the QS 2002 OS9.2 Restore CD image (both from Macintosh Garden), and while I can boot from both from a restored image on a partition of the FW drive, I then get the floppy with a question mark icon and nothing happens. Any ideas on how to proceed with installing OS9? Any images that people have got working on a Quicksilver?

I use the macos9lives universal iso of os9. Works like a charm on my Quicksilvers.

http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=2109.0#lastPost

 

[weckart]

So I've tried both a Universal 9.2.2 image and the QS 2002 OS9.2 Restore CD image (both from Macintosh Garden), and while I can boot from both from a restored image on a partition of the FW drive, I then get the floppy with a question mark icon and nothing happens. Any ideas on how to proceed with installing OS9? Any images that people have got working on a Quicksilver?

I've got the full set of QS 2002 discs. Never had a problem with mine but I can't remember whether I used the installation or restore set.

 

[Amethyst1]

I usually just use the NetBoot OS9 image but that doesn't have an installer. It's drag, drop and go.

System Folder

The Platinum Days

systemfolder.wordpress.com

 

[r6mile]

Will report on how I get on! I don't have a PC to do this on, so hopefully I manage on one of my Powermacs in OSX.

Success! ATI Radeon 9700 successful flashed, using ATI Flasher in Graphiccelerator under OSX Tiger (no need to safe boot) and controlling from my Mac Mini screen sharing. (I tried to use Jaguar but screen share didn't work). The card requires extra power and has a floppy connector, so I used a £1.50 floppy to molex adapter which worked like a charm. As expected I had to tape pins 3 and 11.

Extremely easy! I used the ROM for the Radeon 9700 (after verifying that my ROM chip was the full-size 128k) in the MacElite website. I presume it shows up as a Radeon 9800 Pro because the 9700 ROM is just a modified 9800Pro one.

Very pleased!

Soon I would like to benchmark my two pimped up machines:
MDD dual 1.25, 2GB DDRAM, Radeon 9650 256MB
QS dual 1.0, 1.5GB SDRAM, Radeon 9700 128MB

Despite the QS having the better card, I still expect the MDD to perform better. But I am curious to find out by how much.

Any suggestions of benchmarks that will test CPU, RAM, and GPU at once?

 

[1042686]

Success! ATI Radeon 9700 successful flashed, using ATI Flasher in Graphiccelerator under OSX Tiger (no need to safe boot) and controlling from my Mac Mini screen sharing. (I tried to use Jaguar but screen share didn't work). The card requires extra power and has a floppy connector, so I used a £1.50 floppy to molex adapter which worked like a charm. As expected I had to tape pins 3 and 11.

Extremely easy! I used the ROM for the Radeon 9700 (after verifying that my ROM chip was the full-size 128k) in the MacElite website. I presume it shows up as a Radeon 9800 Pro because the 9700 ROM is just a modified 9800Pro one.

View attachment 948076

Very pleased!

Soon I would like to benchmark my two pimped up machines:
MDD dual 1.25, 2GB DDRAM, Radeon 9650 256MB
QS dual 1.0, 1.5GB SDRAM, Radeon 9700 128MB

Despite the QS having the better card, I still expect the MDD to perform better. But I am curious to find out by how much.

Any suggestions of benchmarks that will test CPU, RAM, and GPU at once?

Congrats. Yeah, I found Graphiccelerator a straightforward to use app as well. I will pull out my PMG4 towers and geekbench them against yours. Would be fun. I have a

QS dual 1Ghz, 1.5Gb ram, Radeon 9000 pro 64mb
MDD dual 800mhz, 2gb ram, Radeon 9000 pro 64mb

Nice builds

 

[mode11]

Success! ATI Radeon 9700 successful flashed, using ATI Flasher in Graphiccelerator under OSX Tiger (no need to safe boot) and controlling from my Mac Mini screen sharing. (I tried to use Jaguar but screen share didn't work). The card requires extra power and has a floppy connector, so I used a £1.50 floppy to molex adapter which worked like a charm. As expected I had to tape pins 3 and 11.

Extremely easy! I used the ROM for the Radeon 9700 (after verifying that my ROM chip was the full-size 128k) in the MacElite website. I presume it shows up as a Radeon 9800 Pro because the 9700 ROM is just a modified 9800Pro one.

View attachment 948076

Very pleased!

Soon I would like to benchmark my two pimped up machines:
MDD dual 1.25, 2GB DDRAM, Radeon 9650 256MB
QS dual 1.0, 1.5GB SDRAM, Radeon 9700 128MB

Despite the QS having the better card, I still expect the MDD to perform better. But I am curious to find out by how much.

Any suggestions of benchmarks that will test CPU, RAM, and GPU at once?

Couple of years ago now, but do you know what VNC server you used with Tiger? Did you have a PCI GPU in the QS as well, or just the PC 9700?

 

[originaldotexe]

Thank you, I am indeed on the lookout for any FireGL X3s in the UK (I already have a dual 1.25 MDD that I have upgraded). In the meantime though inside the MDD I have a Radeon 9650 256MB from a G5 with the pins taped, which will suit me just fine.

I am indeed also intrigued by the option of PCI SATA cards - perhaps not so much for the MDD as it has a faster IDE bus, but for this new QS/DA project it might be worthwhile. Unfortunately I don't have any PC that could flash these, though I guess I could try to source one just for this purpose.



Meanwhile, this morning I picked up the computer, a Digital Audio with a single 533 Mhz G4. It's in great physical condition! Came with only 256MB of RAM, but I've added a 256MB PC133 stick I had around to get to 512MB temporarily, while I wait to order 3x512MB sticks of RAM.

The computer was used for audio production came with what I'm told is a relatively new 40GB IDE hard drive, the stock Geforce 2MX, as well as two interesting PCI cards:
- a huge Mix Core audio capture card that I'm told is reasonably valuable so I'll try to sell this.
- what I think is a SCSI card, an ATTO ExpressPCI PSC. Any ideas on how to make use of this, please welcome!

The seller threw in a 2006 polycarbonate white Macbook with a 2.0 C2D (with dead battery and no charger). It boots up just fine, though the screen looks a bit orange!

Not a bad purchase, for £30 total for the two machines!

Meanwhile, I also got lucky with an eBay listing that had 3 Xserves with dead PSUs, which I got for £20. From these I was able to scavenge a single 1.0 G4, and a single 2.0 G5 (both of these will soon be on their way to @LightBulbFun for some 'PPC-Fun' - look forward to seeing what he does with them!). But I also got what looks like a PCI Radeon 7000 32MB card, which is a pretty good find!

For now I have inserted the Radeon 9000 Pro 64MB that used to be in the MDD, and a 120GB Samsung SSD with a SATA-IDE adapter. Will report on how I get on!

i suggest using a flashed generic pci sil3112 sata controller instead of a sata-ide adapter. works in os 9 and will get you much better speeds than ide. you can buy them brand new for about $20 on ebay and just flash it with an old windows pc with pci slot and a dos boot usb.

g4 533mhz powermac was also the first mac i ever owned! i regret getting rid of it, it had dual 120gb raid 0 hdd's and some other upgrades since the previous owner used it for photography. bought it for $50 back in 2013 or so. would like to get another one again just for nostalgia but its kind of pointless since i already have the mdd

 

[originaldotexe]

oops, i didnt realize how old this thread was lol, i thought it was recent since it was right at the top