Brand spankin\' new 8600/300...well, new to me.

[yelowpunk]

Helo, people. Here's a question more in your knowledge base than mine, as I was probably still in Russia when this Mac was shipping...

An 8600/300 with 64MB RAM and a ~4 Gig SCSI HD. Now, here's some tech-spec questions...

What kind of bus does the RAM run on? 66Mhz, 100, 133?
What's the MAX-OUT on Ram?
Can I get a new video card and still use the RCA-IN and OUT with the same dis/advantages? Can I expand the Video memory? (there's about 3 or so clusters of RAM slots, maybe 10 or more in all...)

Any info is appreciated. No offence on the age thing..  

-Tim

[yelowpunk]

Also, what's the MAX OS I can put on there? If it's 9, I guess there's no sense in putting it p rather than 9.1.x, but if it's X, I might spring for that extra 64MB of SD-RAM. (again, bus?)

/Also/, what's the minimum req's for 9? 128? X? 128 also??

[Epaminondas]

8600

RAM

[krissel]

I've been running my 9600 for nearly five years now and have upgraded it along the way. The 8600 is similar but a little less expandable in number of slots.

You can run 10.1.5 on the 604e but you would need more RAM to do so and it would be rather slow with the 300 processor and the 2MB video memory. I'd max out at 9.1 unless you have $ for a G3/4 processor upgrade in which case you can run Jag with XPostFacto, though it is a lot of work and peripherals are a problem.

You can get a better video card of course (I installed an original Mac Edition Radeon 32MB) and upgrade virtually any other aspect . The RAM chips are DIMMS, not SD-RAM and the maximum size per chip is 128.
You can add USB and Firewire through PCI for use of multibutton mice, other drives, etc.

The only drawback is the amount of money you are willing to spend. I did it incrementally so it made sense to keep my machine up to date but it wouldn't be worth it to do it now, all at once.

[yelowpunk]

Here's a crazy idea:

(don't shun me...)

What if I get [my hands on] OS X 10.2 Server? Will it run if I cough up the dough for RAM? I can buy 128-meg chips online for about $20 apiece, so I guess two will do the trick. Will it work? Also, will a PC-native PCI Netgear card work on the Mac? I took a look at Mac's PCI slots and saw that they are one module-increment bigger. (PC PCI has two module contact rows, Mac's PCI has three. At least on my G4/500 Server.)

So yea, will the 8600/300 pull as a server? I think the 1MB of L2 cache will do wonders.

[yelowpunk]

Ummm... here's a thought:
Apple-History.com tells me the MAX OS is 9.1
(http://www.apple-history.com/frames/body.php?page=gallery&model=8600)
BUT
eBay tells me that someone installed 10.1.5
(http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3401276019&category=4607)

explanations, anyone?

[yelowpunk]

Well, to my surprise, people over at MacAddict had nothing but good things to say about running X Server on an 8600/300



Whattaya know, huh? Of course, XPostFacto was suggested, as the 8600 is not on the /official/ 'supported' list. Still, thopugh, I'm a happy camper.

[kelly]

Tim. You can just paste the URLs in and thay will be made clickable by the Forum software.  

Just remove your brackets and the URL reference.

Yeah. I'd recommend dropping a couple of these in it, whatever OS you decide to run.

http://eshop.macsales.com/Item_DealMac.cfm...tem=OWC5MD128MB

If you'd  be happy with the slow speed of OS X on that machine then good for you.  

http://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/

[Greg Dunn]

According to

This Page

a site for a company that rfefurbishes older macs, the 8600 is upgradeable to run X with an upgrade card and software update from the card manufacturer. Scroll to the bottom of the page, and you'll see what they did with an 8600.

-trying to fix the url-jep
 
 [ 02-12-2003, 04:54 PM: Message edited by: jepinto ]

[krissel]

Tim , if you are serious about running X or Jag you should spend the $10 to join the forum at XPostfacto. There are many threads about people running 8600's on various versions of X. They also have a free list to subscribe to which will also give you help.

I ran X.1.5 on my 9600 while it had the original 350mhz processor and it was not bad. My hard drive is 7200rpm though and the processor had 1MB backside cache so it was relatively quick for older macs. And I can't emphasize the importance of RAM in running X. If you can afford it, put in plenty. I maxed at 1.5 G.

When I upgraded the processor to G4/700 I intended to run Jag but ran into problems with the stock video card and a reluctance of the new setup to recognize X on the drive or even the drive itself under XPostFacto. It is probably some SCSI termination issue or perhaps I need to set the drive to the slower external SCSI bus but I don't plan on messing around at this point. It runs 9.1 fast and with only a few temporary stalls that resolve themselves. Ryan Rempel is the genius who came up with the hack to run X on older machines and the next version of XPF is supposed to allow booting  X from an external Firewire drive. Now that  will be something to cheer.
   

In short, you can do a lot with that machine if you have the time and determination (and $).