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7300/7500/7600/8500/8600/9500/9600 Daughterboards Finding
Posted by: IIciNov90 on 2014-01-20 11:45:51 I have been working on my SE/30s and needed to move and install some files to them but this work took an interesting PCI Powermac detour. viewtopic.php?f=7&t=22672&p=225155#p225155 The easiest way to do this was by taking my SE/30 SCSI drives and adding them to the internal SCSI chain and then using the CD ROM. It had been about a year or two since I last fired up the 7600. My 7600 has a 233 604e card in it. Anyways, I fired it up from the keyboard but got no chime and a black screen using the built-in video. I could hear the hard disks spin up but that was it. I removed the battery and sure enough it was dead. I replaced the battery and fired it up again, this time to a chime but still no screen. I have lists of spare daughterboards. I tried a 200 - same deal, a Sonnet G3 - same deal, A Sonnet G4 - Same deal. Finally I tried a dual 604e 200 that I snagged off of a 9600MP I found in a trash heap around the corner from the MacWorld Expo in NYC in 2002. While I always found this daughterboard interesting, my 604e 233 always "felt" faster so I stayed with that card and kept the dual 200 stored away in a drawer in an antistatic bag. The dual 200 chimed and fired up though the screen though it was garbled. I removed the VRAM DIMMs, "erasered up" the contacts and put them back in and it booted up clear and garble free the next go round. I decided to retry all of my previously failed daughterboards and none of them would work. And yes, just in case anyone was wondering, I did reset the CUDA after each board change. The dual 604e 200 works every time. I wanted to see what was different... Examining all of the daughterboards closely revealed electrolytic CAPs on all of them in varying degrees except for the dual 604e 200 which has 100% Tantalums. The dual 200s were known to run hotter so Apple must have played it safe and used Tantalums for better reliability. No wonder these 8600 and 9600 MP systems were so pricy! Long story short, it looks like I have more recapping in my future and if a MP 604e daughterboard presents itself to you, definitely do not pass it up! Brian
Posted by: trag on 2014-01-20 14:31:45 Thank you. Good to know. I wonder what type of caps the clone makers used....
Posted by: Macdrone on 2014-01-20 15:17:02 They used even worse caps on motherboards and cards. My three clones (only one works anymore) look like they spent money making the LC in comparison.
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