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The Tanzania Motherboards

Dan Knight - 2001.10.04

The Tanzania motherboard was introduced in October 1996 and supported the PowerPC 603e and 604e processors on a 40 MHz system bus. This motherboard was used in the Power Mac 4400, Motorola StarMax 3000 and 4000, and Umax SuperMac C500 and C600, as well as some lesser known clones.

The standard Tanzania motherboard had three PCI slots, although some designs (particularly the Umax models) left the slots off the motherboard and used a riser card with two (C500) or three (C600) slots.

The Tanzania board was designed to accept three unbuffered 3.3V 168-pin 60ns EDO DIMMs,* supporting up to 32 MB in the first slot and 64 MB in slots 2 and 3. This allowed up to 160 MB of RAM. The memory controller on the Tanzania motherboard does not support 128 MB or higher capacity DIMMs.

* The Umax SuperMac C500 and C600 used a customized Tanzania motherboard with 16 MB onboard and supporting 5V DIMMs.

The motherboard included EIDE and SCSI-2 support, as well as onboard ATI Mac64 VT graphics. In some cases, there were also PS/2 ports for a mouse and keyboard, although Apple did not incorporate that into the Power Mac 4400.

According to Macs Only!, Macs and clones with the Tanzania motherboard should not use System 7.5.5, although both System 7.5.3 and Mac OS 7.6 will work just fine.

Tanzania II

The most significant change with the Tanzania II motherboard was increasing bus speed from 40 MHz to 50 MHz. The graphics chip was upgraded to the ATI Rage II+, but other features (including the unusual 32 MB limit on the first DIMM socket) remained the same.

The Motorola StarMax 5000 series used the Tanzania II motherboard.

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