Arriving amongst the stash of things brought home from the VCF Midwest trip, it’s good to see all the plastics and internals survived on this heavily upgraded Power Mac 9600/300. Not sure what to name it yet, but I think it’ll remain a dedicated OS 9 machine. Probably gonna drop an SSD into here at some point for responsiveness.

Packed with a Maxpower 455 MHz G3, this Power Mac 9600/300 was upgraded long ago and left as-configured since then. Introduced August 5th 1997 along with the Power Mac 9600/350, it was discontinued on March 17th, 1998 – not many people picked one up.

Inside the Power Mac 9600/300

It’s not only the processor that’s upgraded.. right away there’s a strikingly blue cable connected to a Sonnet Tempo Ultra ATA/133, snaking up to a 60 GB IDE sitting on top of the PSU.

It’s remarkably clean inside, as though the internals time-warped from 20 years ago. A retrobriting plan needs to be made to restore the Apple Platinum look, as over time the plastics become all shades of beige from exposure to sun, UV light, and due to the flame resistant chemical additives. I think all I’m gonna do is get a hi-cap HDD, get the Hi-Cap OS 9 drivers and cram it full of software.

Before getting all the peripherals connected.. I had fleeting thoughts about getting Mac OS X Tiger on this to see how a GeForce 6600 LE would work over a PCI to PCIe adapter, although later realized it’s too risky (so I did’t). PCI only delivers 25W, and the 6600 LE demands <35W even if my Sawtooth G4 is ok with it. Even if it worked, it would soak all the bandwidth up and cause issues.

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Hardware upgrades and Specs

• Model: Power Macintosh 9600/300
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• CPU: 445 MHz Newer Technology Maxlogic MaxPowr G3
  • 1 CPU, 1 Core, 32-Bit, PowerPC 750, <6W TDP (Source: See IBM Datasheet)
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• RAM: 1.18 GB of 70ns 168-pin DIMMs
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• Graphics: GPU 1 – ATI Rage LT Pro, 8 MB SDRAM
  • Samsung LC27F591FD, 1600 x 1200, Millions of Colors, 60 Hz, via VGA port
  • 75 MHz GPU Clock, 100 MHz Memory Clock, 800 MB/s Memory Bandwidth
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• GPU 2: ATI 3D Rage II PCI
  • 60 Mhz GPU Clock, 83 MHz Memory Clock, 4 MB SDRAM, 664 MB/s Bandwidth
  • DB-15, Composite, and S-Video out
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• Boot Drive: 2.1 GB Seagate ST3215N SCSI, Mac OS 9.1
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• More Storage: 60 GB Maxtor 6Y060L0, with many apps including Photoshop 5.5
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• Operating System: Mac OS 9.1
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• PCI Cards:
  • Sonnet Tempo HD Ultra ATA/133 (Ultra-Tek133P+)
  • D-Link DFE-530TX+ 10/100 PCI Ethernet
  • Lucent USB + Firewire PCI Combo card
    • Lucent USS312MC Controller – USB 1.1
    • Lucent FW323-04 Controller – FireWire 400
  • Atto 68-Pin Express PCI SCSI controller card

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Seeing the Upgrade cards up close

1: 445 MHz Newer Technology Maxlogic MaxPowr G3

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2: Sonnet Tempo HD Ultra ATA/133 (Ultra-Tek133P+)

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3: D-Link DFE-530TX+ 10/100 PCI Ethernet

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4: ATI 3D Rage II PCI

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5: ATI Rage LT Pro, 8 MB SDRAM

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6: Lucent USB + Firewire PCI Combo card

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7: Atto 68-Pin Express PCI SCSI controller card

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A gateway to the earliest “familiar” era of computing (to me)

1995-2001 was exactly the era I had my first-ever experiences with computers, with a pizza box style Compaq Presario Windows 95 home PC, and back when going to a computer lab in school was a big deal. I wasn’t particularly allowed to use the home PC (probably because it was expensive and difficult for my family to know how to use), and I also remember sometime in Late 2000 at school when a bunch of us stood in a new computer lab near the end of the building, with the principal explaining how lucky we were to have one. I still remember penny penguin’s math bingo, and Math Blaster: In search of Spot, all on Windows 95. I don’t think I remember a time I was shown Windows 3.x, ever.

It wasn’t until later on around 2003-4 that I was able to start having my own user account, really be allowed to use the computer, and start exploring. That’s why the HP Pavilion a430n is my first PC.

To SSD or not to SSD?

The Sonnet Tempo HD can connect a 2.5″ IDE HDD, and this calls for possibly getting an IDE to mSATA adapter, although I also have a spare IDE to SDCard adapter. The IDE to SATA adapter was a no-go, seeing as it wasn’t working in anything I tried it in.

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What I’ll use it for

Since it has Photoshop 5.5 installed on it already, it’s easy to jump on here and get started using it right away. Would like to get it connected over the network for easier file transfer, might just setup a local FTP server for that. I want to become increasingly familiar with ’80s – ’90s Macs and Mac OS.

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Some Quirks

Initially I was looking into an SSD upgrade due to how long it takes to boot, thinking it would give some breathing room, and spoke to Dan Bashur about this idea; and he gave me some insight which made me reconsider the upgrade altogether for now.

Dan B: “It will boot slow with the large amount of RAM. The RAM used in those machines at the time was state of the art and extremely expensive.

The 128 MB DIMMs didn’t even exist when the machine was released, and you could max it out with 768 MB in late 1997 for $20,000. In 1995 when the Power Mac 9500 was out, it was double that to max out the RAM (around $40k). The 128 MB modules later were developed to get it to 1.5 GB max.

You should see if it’s using EDO (Extended Data Out) RAM versus FPM (Fast Page Mode) RAM. The best is EDO at 60ns for the best latency. Seems like an odd combination of memory that it’s reporting unless there’s some unmatched pairs.. that too would slow it down big time. For 1.152 GB precisely you’d have 6×128 GB modules is 768 MB and 6×64 MB you’d have 384 MB. To have it report 1.18 GB, there has to be another 32 MB somewhere.

The possible combo of DIMMs might be:

8×128 MB =1,024 MB
2×64 MB =128 MB
2×16 MB=32 MB”

The Low End Mac team trades with each other frequently and collaborates to bring as many articles to the site as possible. Dan had a Power Mac 9600 he got a while back and with too many Macs at LEM HQ, he decided that it would be the perfect Mac for me to try out for vintage Mac OS 9 computing. Thank you for the Power Mac, Dan!