XYMer's Home away from Home

So I have a souped-up 7500/100. 1ghz Powerlogix G3, 1GB RAM, FW400/USB2 card, Sonnet ATA133 card with a 500GB hard drive. OS 9 and OS 10.4 installed with XPostFacto. It's great, but the thing lacks a video card.

I have three laying around: An old 2MB ATI Mach64, a Radeon Mac Edition (7200), and a Mac Radeon 9200LE. The Mach64 card works fine in the 7500. No issues. The Radeon ME worked once randomly. The 9200 doesn't work in it at all. It'll power up, chime, and then nothing. No attempt at boot, can't even zap the PRAM. The 7500 has a new PRAM battery and works just fine otherwise. Both of those cards work flawlessly in an MDD G4, so I know they're not bad. I've tried the 124 and 127 ROM on the 9200 (the 201 ROM didn't work at all, had to downgrade), but no luck. The ME has the latest ROM already.

What gives? I know the ME should work, and the 9200 has plenty of reports of running in old world PCI machines on Xlr8yourmac from back in the day.

Where did the 9200 card come from?

I ask because there were a LOT of people reflashing PC cards back then. As I recall there were issues due to the PC cards drawing more power than the strictly-spec PCI buses in Macs allowed.

Pop open the case with the 7200 installed and see if its fan spins up. If not, it's overheating and frying itself damn near instantly. Those fans make some rather annoying dentist drill sounding noise when running so they should be easy enough to hear even if you can't see (as long as the case is open when you check).

I'm pretty certain the Mach64 is not compatible with OS X, but the 7200 can if you force QE to be enabled. Sucks being stuck in the PCI realm with regard to GPU, meaning your only source is AMD for the most part as nobody worth their salt parted with the voodoo 2 and 3 (and very rare 5) GPUs for the Mac back in the day.

_________________
Official Mac Tech Support Forum Cookie™ (Mint Chocolate Chip)
Guaranteed tasty; Potentially volatile when dipped in WWIII Forum Syrup®
Caution: This cookie bites back.

Might booting to OS9 or earlier tell if the cards are actually working?

The fan spins on the 7200. It makes an ugly sound, but it's working. The 9200 is a genuine Mac card.

Like I said, both cards work flawlessly in an MDD. I can boot them up with a monitor attached and they're fine. The 7500 chimes and never outputs video or boots with these. It's not a matter of OS support (the Mach64 does work with OS X, but probably as no more than a dumb frame buffer), but a matter of hardware support, which makes no sense to me. There are plenty of reports of 9200 being used in pre-G3 machines and the ME should work without issue.

It sounds like the 7500 might not be supplying enough Amps to the PXC I bus.

Yeah, that's my suspicion, or at least that it's not able to pump enough juice to a single slot. Even removing the other cards doesn't help. Dunno if it's the PSU or the board. I wouldn't think that this thing is old enough to need a recapping, but maybe so. Wish there was a way I could test this. Mac Test Pro has no issue on it.

Just out of curiosity, I'm assuming you're using a bus setting of 50 MHz and a multiplier of 20? What are the full specs on this souped up machine? VRAM DIMMs, L3 cache DIMM, the works. Something tells me that you are currently running on the "barely stable" edge and putting in a GPU blows that to hell and back.

The VRAM DIMMs and L3 cache DIMM make a massive difference in stability, as oftentimes, you'll need to remove any cache DIMM with the daughtercard upgrades to remain stable, and almost no 7500s were ever stable above 50 MHz bus speed.

_________________
Official Mac Tech Support Forum Cookie™ (Mint Chocolate Chip)
Guaranteed tasty; Potentially volatile when dipped in WWIII Forum Syrup®
Caution: This cookie bites back.

Usually a G3 upgrade required you to ditch the cache DIMM. The systems where the cache DIMM were integrated had the hardest time with upgrades.

The G3 card is locked at a 50mhz speed, 20x multiplier. It's not adjustable. There is no cache DIMM. This is probably one of the 7500s that shipped without one. No ROM SIMM either. Two VRAM slots are populated, seems stock. The SCSI hard drive has been removed and replaced with an IDE drive connected to the card. SCSI slot-loading DVD-ROM drive. ADB kb/mouse. Macally USB/FW400 card, 3x FW (one internal), 4x USB 2.0 (two internal). Sonnet TempoATA/133 card. Still doesn't work with those two removed and a Radeon ME or 9200 in any slot.

I'm putting my money on a power issue. The old components may not be running as well as they used to.

Can you pull say the FW card or more & see if the Video cards work?

BD:

Ah, thanks MB.