Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:44:45 -0500
From: Brian Lanning <brianlanning at gmail.com>
It already has scsi and ehternet so I'm not sure
what else I would put
in there unless I found something unique or interesting.
The built-in SCSI is unenhanced SCSI. That means that its maximum
theoretical performance is 5 MB/s. It's okay, but can seem a trifle slow.
The best SCSI NuBus card only goes up to Fast & Wide (20 MB/s theoretical
maximum). There are no Ultra-SCSI nor IDE/ATA NuBus cards for the Mac.
If the thing has an original hard drive in, you could probably get some
speed boost just by installing a more modern SCSI drive with a faster
media speed. As slow as the built-in SCSI was in older Macs, the hard
drives of the day usually couldn't sling data even that fast.
I still need to track down that goofy ethernet dongle
that gives you an
rj-45.
The connector is called an AAUI (Apple AUI) so you need an AAUI to UTP
transceiver. Of course, if you're hunting on Ebay, there's no telling
what the seller will call it. There were also transceivers for thinnet
and thicknet, so do not accidentally buy the wrong one.
Those things were cheap to free a few years ago. They may have all made
their way through the second-hand system to the point where they're not as
easy to come by now. If you have a Goodwill Computer Works store in your
area, you might check their cable bins. Ours used to be full of the
transceivers.
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:49:18 -0500
From: Brian Lanning <brianlanning at gmail.com>
On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 3:31 PM, Cameron Kaiser
<spectre at floodgap.com>
wrote:
A Radius card
would go nicely in a unit like this, though.
ok, so I'll start shopping for that.
I'm having a hard time telling the difference between the video cards.
They all look the same to me although I'm sure some are better than
others.
It's been a while since I checked, so my memory may be faulty, but I think
that I remember that the built-in video on the Quadra 700 and 900/950 is
faster than you're likely to get with a NuBus card. It's primarily a
bandwidth issue.
Telling the difference in NuBus video cards can be truly dizzying.
The four main players were Raster Ops, Radius, SuperMac (not the later
Umax owned clone maker), and E-Machines (not the much later PC maker).
Around '94 SuperMac bought E-Machines. Not long after that Radius bought
SuperMac.
When they were being made, the NuBus video cards fell into two categories:
consumer and professional. The late model consumer cards are good
yeoman-like cards. The professional cards have some great QuickDraw
acceleration on board.
The fastest Mac NuBus video cards were the Radius Thunder IV GX series and
the Villagetronic MacPicasso 340 (not the 320). I think Sonnet also sold
the latter under another name. Raster Ops may have had a card in the same
class, but I'm just not very familiar with the Raster Ops products.
The Thunder IV GX series came in four models, 1152, 1360, 1600 and the
Thunder 24/GT. The first three indicate the first number in the highest
resolution of the card which supported 24 bit color. The latter,
differently named card is just like the 1152, except it lacks the DSP
daughter board. The IV GX models were about $3000 when new. The Thunder
24/GT was a bargain at just under $1000.
All of these usually command a pretty high price if they come up for sale
at all, but they are faster (in some functions) than a PowerMac PDS-based
HPV card. They excel at tasks which are amenable to Quickdraw
acceleration. They are still limited by NuBus' bandwidth and so are not
so good at throwing frames up on the screen in quick succession.
The late model consumer level cards include the Radius PrecisionColor Pro
24 series and the E-Machines Futura II series. Each of these contained
three or four models which carried different amounts of VRAM.
To truly muck things up, there was an earlier card called the Radius
PrecisionColor 24 (no Pro) and the Futura (no II). The earlier cards
were bigger and slower and less compatible. Again, Raster Ops probably
had something too.
SuperMac's last professional level card is often recommended by people and
it's a good card by all accounts (I haven't tried one).
The Futura II SX had a couple of optional daughter boards. One was a DSP
coprocesser board, which isn't all that interesting these days. The other
was an ethernet daughter board, which isn't especially enhancing in a
Q700. The ethernet driver for the daughter board doesn't work with Open
Transport and will freeze the machine at boot time if both the driver and
Open Transport are loaded. The ethernet daughter board only works with
Classic Networking.
Okay, that's probably way more detail than you need, but how often do I
get to dump this accumulation of now mostly useless knowledge out?
Personally, I would just get the VRAM, unless you need support for larger
displays for some reasons.
Jeff Walther
