PowerMac 7600 and PCI USB 2 Card

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Level 2

180 points

PowerMac 7600 and PCI USB 2 Card

About a year ago I upgraded my daughter's PowerMac 7600 with 512 of RAM and Sonnet Crescendo G4 1GHz Card. Using XPostFacto 4 I installed MacOS X Tiger. After resolving a few issues it's been a year of nice performance for this machine (with zero manteinance). So I decided to fully upgrade it with another 512 of RAM, add an ATI PCI 7000 Radeon and a PCI Firewire/USB 2 Tango Card. The Hard Drive is a 60GB Maxtor with two partitions: One for Mac OS 9.1 and the other for Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11.

After the upgrade I've noticed that when connecting devices to the USB ports under Mac OS X Tiger the Finder tends to freeze and even the whole System so I have to force restart. When using the USB ports under Mac OS 9.1 it works fine.

I've used a generic USB MP3 player (DOS formatted), an Apollo imation USB Drive (Mac formatted) and a USB Flash Wristband (Mac formatted).

The machine configuration is as follows:

PowerMac 7600 with Sonnett Crescendo G4 1GHz Card
8 128 MB RAM Modules for 1GB of Memory (All from OWC, same specs)
Sonnet Tempo Ultra ATA 66 PCI Card
ATI Radeon 7000 PCI Card
Sonnet Tango Firewire/USB 2 PCI Card
Maxtor 60GB IDE Hard Drive
LaCie CDRW IDE Drive

Any suggestions?

Thanks for all your help!

G3 400 BW/ 1 GB RAM/ 120GB HD/ DVR-111D/ ATI Radeon 9200/ Tempo Trio 133, Mac OS X (10.4.11), iBook G4 1.33 GHz/ 1,25 GB RAM/ 60 GB HD/ 150 GB HD FW/ Mac OS X 10.4.11

Posted on May 5, 2009 12:12 PM

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Answer 1

May 5, 2009 6:30 PM in response to nOmada

The specs on the PCI card state:

Mac Compatibility
Power Mac® G3 (Blue & White)(2) and Power Mac G4 (with PCI slots)
Power Mac G5 (with PCI or PCI-X slots)
Mac OS® X Version 10.5.2+, 10.4(3), or 10.3(3)
Mac OS 9 (at USB 1.1 speed)

However, just because older PM 7600s are not listed, it appears to be hardware compatible. It could be something related to the fact that you used XPostFacto to run OS 10.4. Many older PMs could only use 2-port USB PCI cards. On my old PM 6500, I used a Belkin model F5U005 2-port USB PCI card. I don't know if this card would provide USB 2.0 when running 10.4.

 Cheers, Tom 😉

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Answer 2

Jeff

Level 6

12,328 points

May 5, 2009 10:05 PM in response to nOmada

Multi-bus/multi-controller cards can be problematic in older Power Macs, and their power requirements may be too much for the PCI bus. Did you connect a mini-power connector from the power supply to the Tango card? The combination of the Radeon graphics card, the IDE controller card, and USB/FireWire card may be overtaxing the 7600's 150 watt power supply. I'd decide which was more essential and then go with a 2-port FireWire or a 2-port USB 2.0 card.

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Answer 3

nOmada Author

Level 2

180 points

May 6, 2009 9:51 AM in response to Jeff

Thanks for your reply Jeff.

Maybe you're right about the PCI overtaxing, but why it's not a problem under OS 9?
I guess that may be it's the order of the PCI cards. Unfortunately I don't have the computer with me
but the next time I visit my daughter I'll try reordering the cards.

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