In my hot little hands( Sonnet G4 PCI NIB )

[DearthnVader]

Just received shipment of a brand new old stock Sonnet G4 Crescendo PCI upgrade card for my PowerMac 9600, still in the factory shrink wrap.

It's the later revision as it has the 50Mhz fixed frequency oscillator to set the bus speed to 50Mhz. Sonnet used a 45Mhz oscillator for compatibility with the older 45Mhz Bus Powermacs and clones.

So I may get a surprise if I remove the heatsink to see the rating of the CPU as I doubt there were many 400Mhz models still in supply when Sonnet built this card.

BTW, @Lightningbulb, what CPU did Sonnet use on these?

I presume 7410?

I don't want to open it just yet to find out the PVR. If it is a 7410 what CPU's could be "baked" in place of the 400Mhz CPU?

 

[LightBulbFun]

Nice find!

the CPU is likely to be a 7400, but if its particularly late card I could see sonnet using a 7410 just for availability reasons (but all the Sonnet PCI G4 cards of this speed I have seen in detail have had 7400's, however my sample size is not all that big, and I have seen 500Mhz Sonnet G4 ZIFs use both 7400's and 7410's)

however regardless there is sadly not much of an upgrade path, if its 7400 you could upgrade to a 7410 but it does not give much benefit, apart from cooler running for the same clock

the issue is the 7400 and 7410 both have a max multiplier of 9x which on a 50Mhz bus gives you only 450Mhz (a speed attainable by both 7400 and 7410)

you could however in theory upgrade the backside L2 cache to 2MB which would probably help somewhat on some workloads given how bus bottlenecked these early PCI macs are at faster CPU speeds (but sonnet like to make their cards "smart" and use firmware and the such like which my get in the way of such an L2 cache upgrade)


what I really want to see is someone take one of the 7450-7455 based Sonnet 700Mhz-1Ghz 7300-9600 upgrade cards and upgrade the CPU on one to a 7457, or even 7448 with a suitable interposer board, see the 700Mhz-1Ghz PCI Mac sonnet cards are unsual in that you can overclock them, they have standard multiplier PLL resistors, and indeed I know of one person on the 68kMLA who upgraded an 800Mhz card with a 1.42Ghz CPU pillaged from an MDD and made a 1.4Ghz 9600 which was quite impressive, (the Max multiplier is 28 so you cant make a 2Ghz 9600 sadly)