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Temperature questions for Sonnet G3/L2 350 card

Submitted by AG-Wolf on January 23, 2007 - 6:15pm. PowerPC Macs

Because this board is a little more active than the other part of AF that I frequent, I figured I'd ask here.

I have a 6500 board with a 350mhz Sonnet L2 G3 upgrade. While it's in my 6500 tower, ventillation is fine... but I'm one of those nuts over in the Color Classic section who has crammed all of this into the tiny Color Classic chassis. I'm not looking for tech support with that, don't worry... but I AM curious as to how hot the little G3 should be running.

With everything installed on the motherboard, I reach normal operating temperature of around 50 degrees celcius. I have two pci cards, one is a very large ATI video card, and the other is a tiny USB card. The video card needs to be in the PCI slot that is closer to the motherboard, and as such, there isn't much room or ventillation over the stock 603e processor. I DO have a small 50mm fan over the corner of the motherboard where the RCA A/V jacks are located, which offers a little circulation at least... but there's not much else I can do. If I remove the video card, the average temperature drops to around 47c, which is better but still not great.

I'm just trying to find out if these higher temperatures are really bad or not... I've found a couple places that say normal operating temps for a G3 are like up to 68c, so I should be clear, but even still, it seems pretty high.

If the video card isnt installed, it gives me more room to be creative with air circulation, but I don't know what other kinds of cards are out there. This one is a good card, at least.. it's an ATI Rage LT Pro, it also has TV output and some other third video connector as well. I want something similarly capable but physically a bit smaller; What should I be looking for in that case?

Any help is much appreciated, thanks in advance

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I've got a 400mhz Sonnet G3/L

Submitted by sfinro on January 23, 2007 - 10:50pm.

I've got a 400mhz Sonnet G3/L2 in my 9600. It hardly gets warm - the hottest I've ever had it was 44 celsius whilst encoding MP3s and doing ProTools editing at the same time. That said, I'd think 50 degrees should be fairly OK though - on a hot day my Pentium 4 system will push past 60. I don't really start worrying till I get to 65 or so.

» Romana: 9600 with Sonnet G3/400. 384mb RAM, 8gb + 4.5gb HDD, OS 10.3.9
Davros: Beige G3/266. 384mb RAM, 10gb HDD, OS 10.3.9
TARDIS: Wallstreet 233. 96mb RAM, 4gb HDD, OS 9.2.2 (currently non-functional)

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Hawaii Cruiser's picture

Hot, but not abnormal

Submitted by Hawaii Cruiser on January 24, 2007 - 4:47am.

Sonnet G3/L2 in a 9600? I've never heard of that before. Do they actually work in the PCI Macs, or are you confusing the G3/L2 with the Sonnet G3 daughter card?

In my 6500, 50 C was quite normal, and could climb up into the 60's with intensive programs. I also installed a fan right on the G3/L2 heatsink by bending back the floppy drive bracket and mounting the fan on it. With a 400/512 Sonnet G3 I was then getting temps in the low 30's up to the low 40's. If you go over to the 6400zone site you'll see people getting much less, but I'd expect in a lot of cases that's because their rooms are cold too. There's one guy there who was running the machine without side panels who was getting very low temps. All 350 and 400mhz Sonnet G3/L2's are not alike, though, and some will run cooler than others.

Of course, when Apple designed the 6500's cooling system, they had no idea that one day there would be upgrades through the L2 slot, but getting a lower profile video card shouldn't make much of a difference, especially if you've already got a fan around there.

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Oops, I was thinking of mine

Submitted by sfinro on January 24, 2007 - 5:37am.

Oops, I was thinking of mine having a L2 cache. Yeah I have just got the daughtercard. I wouldn't worry too much about the temperature though.

» Romana: 9600 with Sonnet G3/400. 384mb RAM, 8gb + 4.5gb HDD, OS 10.3.9
Davros: Beige G3/266. 384mb RAM, 10gb HDD, OS 10.3.9
TARDIS: Wallstreet 233. 96mb RAM, 4gb HDD, OS 9.2.2 (currently non-functional)

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Hawaii Cruiser's picture

Yeah, now that I think about

Submitted by Hawaii Cruiser on January 24, 2007 - 9:04am.

Yeah, now that I think about it, the 9600 doesn't even have an L2 slot.

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AG-Wolf's picture

Well the 6500 has a strong ex

Submitted by AG-Wolf on January 24, 2007 - 9:41am.

Well the 6500 has a strong exhaust fan RIGHT over the entire main board, so that tower itself is good. Whenever I was using the tower, the card always stayed around the upper 30's or so.

I know different revisions of the L2 upgrade cards can run cooler.... My 350/1M is a Revision A, so it's a first-run model :/ I just won a 400/512k off eBay, but it's revision A also x_x I don't think there will be much of a difference between the two cards, speedwise, but at least this way I'll have a backup, and I'll also have something to sell when it comes time to get a 500mhz card.

I've also checked out 6400zone earlier today, but thanks for the suggestion Smiling

Right now, I'm focusing on getting a headphone jack in the front of the color classic, setting up the infrared receiver thingy and putting the FM/TV tuner card in somewhere. Thanks for the reassurance of the temps around 50c though... I'm not letting myself get too caught up with them anymore right now, especially if you've had it even higher under stronger work loads.

» Main PC: Sempron 2Ghz 256k L2/768MB Ram/40,60,120Gb HD's/CDRW/DVD+-RW/WinXP SP2
ยป Main Mac: PowerMac 6500 inside Color Classic/G3 500Mhz 1MB L2/128Mb Ram/40Gb HD/OS 9.1/ATI Rage 128/OrangeLink USB-FireWire/CSII E-net/TV-FM Tuner

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