Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 22:43:27 -0500 From: billycar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I Recently acquired a 9500 and have upgraded it as outlined below. Having some trouble with the Sonnet FW/USB card. One FW port doesn't seem to work and the USB Logitech wireless mouse and keyboard is giving erratic results. Mouse works fine for a short while, then starts not responding. Got a system freeze, and when I unplugged the USB transmitter dock, it released the system.
I'm not sure what a USB transmitter dock is, but could it be drawing too much power from the USB port? You may need to get a powered USB hub and put it between the USB card and your peripheral. I've seen that problem before, especially on early iMacs with power drawing USB peripherals.
My unstable arrangement is: A1 ixmicro ultimateRez Video Card B1 Sonnet FW/USB C1 D2 M-Audio 2496 Sound Card (2IN-2OUT-MIDI/SPDIF) E2 F2 I'm currently trying this arrangement: A1 Sonnet FW/USB B1 C1 ixmicro ultimateRez Video Card D2 E2 F2 M-Audio 2496 Sound Card (2IN-2OUT-MIDI/SPDIF) 1 and 2 indicates separate buses as I understand it.
That is correct. They are separate PCI busses. Each is bridged by its own Bandit chip (343S0020). A bridge translates data from one bus to another. In this case the Bandit chips translate data from the memory/CPU bus to their respective CPU busses.
I would try moving the M-Audio back to slot D2, and put the FW/USB card in E2 or F2. The Ult. Rez. card has a driver issue which plays into a firmware flaw in the x500/x600 machines (see below). This flaw is also aroused by dual function cards such as the FW/USB cards. Putting them on separate busses may alleviate the issue. On the other hand, it looks like your sound card may be multi-function as well...
Try disabling the drivers for the Ult. Rez. card and see if your symptoms change. This kills the performance of the Ult. Rez. so is not a solution, but it is a useful test. Unfortunately, IMS went out of business before the smoothed all the bugs out of the drivers for the Ult. Rez. They did a bang-up job on the Twin Turbo drivers, but they put out about twice as many revisions of those before they got it right.
I would like to try adding a Sonnet ATA/100 IDE card. Where would you add it? In my 8500, it interfered with the M-Audio card (Possible Explanaiton: too fast a transmission rate, ate up the bandwidth)
You might have better luck with an Acard IDE card. In my experience, the Sonnet cards have more compatibility problems. There is something funny about the Sonnet firmware that makes the card look like two devices and the x500/x600 machines have an Open Firmware bug which plays into that. Of course, if you already have the Sonnet card on hand, that's advice that would cost money.
Any good discussions on the 9500s 6 PCI Slots / Dual Bus / Bandwidth / Latency ?
Generally, the two PCI busses are an advantage. However, there are issues with bus arbitration on the memory/CPU bus. This is why there are/were problems with G4 processors on the 9500/9600 machines. A 7500/8500 class machine has a CPU, memory controller, a video controller and a single Bandit chip on the memory/CPU bus. A 9500 has a CPU, memory controller, and two Bandit chips on the memory/CPU bus.
For some reason, having two Bandit chips on the CPU bus can cause arbitration contention issues. However, this problem lives on the memory bus, not on the PCI busses. But if you have no PCI cards on PCI bus 2, or only certain low activity cards, then the second Bandit never demands attention on the memory bus in a way that causes the problem. But that's only a problem with some G4 cards.
An interesting aside is that the x500 architecture was designed to support up to four Bandit chips or three Bandits and a Video Controller. Apple never built a machine with more than two devices, but it would have been cool to have a machine with four Bandits (twelve PCI slots).
Also, Bandit is capable of supporting more than three PCI slots. For example, it actually drives four PCI devices on the 7500/8500 and the first PCI bus of the 9500. The Grand Central chip which handles the motherboard I/O on those machines is a fourth PCI device connected to Bandit.
On the Apple Network Server (same chipset) the first Bandit chip drives *six* PCI devices--Grand Central, two SCSI chips, a Video chip, and two PCI slots.
So four Bandits, times six slots, minus Grand Central, could have meant a machine with *25* PCI slots....
I've Google'd to Little Avail ...
There is little reliable information available. Too bad Apple designers never weighed in with any opinions. I think Apple had the Power Computing engineers put to death so they wouldn't talk.
If you see discussion about "bus mastering" slots, ignore it. It's well intentioned but flat out wrong. Every PCI slot on Macintoshes is Bus Mastering. There is an OS bug/feature which means that the first PCI slot to initialize may be the only one enabled for block transfers (higher performance), but that has nothing to do with bus mastering.
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