The MP project
Submitted by gnickers on March 6, 2007 - 2:25am.
Been wanting to build a dual MP mac for some time but 9600's have been hard to come by, even offered $40 for one!
However, this week i rescued from a dumpster a umax 900. The thing was a grimy mess and was full of evil smelling dustballs. Took the whole thing apart and cleaned it thoroughly using toothpaste and an toothbrush on the plastic and prosolve/armour all spray. Some pieces were too bad to save but managed to get the video card, the apollo card and the motherboard and power supply and the plastic innards.
Luckily i had a s700 case that had a logic board but no innards but was clean and had a scsi cd.
Pulled a 604e 200mhz cpu from the 8600, added some ram, the video card, a couple scsi drives, etc, found the umax cd that came with the 700 and booted up. Installed ok and run pretty good with the 600+ mb of ram. One set is mismatched and the unit only reboots if you reset the cuda. Will swap later. Tested a second 604e 200mhz and it is fine.
Need to pull a 10/100 ethernet card from the 7600. The 128 turbo video card eems to run good, need to test against the ati rage cards, although it may depend more if i want to try linux on it.
Found a 9.1 and a 4.5 gig scsi drives. The cd is a bit flaky, so it needs replacing too.
Now we know the parts are all working time to take everything apart and rebuild using the 900 logic board and the 2 604e cpu's and fix the ram. May have to think about additional cooling as 604's run very hot and the 700 is a desktop case.
Then we need to think about the OS. The offical umax ver 8 runs ok but some quick research shows upgrading to 9.x or osx is problematic and the umax ftp site has disappeared again so no updated files...
Besides classic os does not use mp - although it allows applications like photoshop to use both cpu's. Maybe it's time to see how well it would run linux...but which one?
Finished the project as far as it could go without a dual cpu. Added the 2nd case fan and a 10gig scsi drive and installed OS 8.0 from the original UMAX CD plus some stuff from the original UMAX applications CD. After the usual extensions tweaking it runs really well, quite snappy. Pretty quiet too considering the amount of cooling. Put the extra parts (2nd floppy, 700 motherboard...) in a box in the closet. Have to put this project away until the term is over...
will post pics later
gord