I am wondering if the people who have upgraded their Power Macintosh 6500 and 5500 computers with one of the Crescendo G3 upgrade cards by Sonnet, have found any compatibility issues with them. The issues could be relating to Mac OS 9, third party software, hardware like Voodoo 3 video cards etc.

Information on these G3 cards can be found at http://www.sonnettech.com/product/crescendo_g3_l2.html

Please specify the speed and cache size of your cards and your Mac model.

[This message has been edited by Seagull (edited 02-17-2000).]

I upgraded my 6500/225 with a sonnet card about 1 year ago. I found that this card is NOT compatible with the built-in modem. I notified Sonnet about it and they told me to get another modem! I also find this card (G3/400) to be very unstable when running other applications and totally useless when surfing the web. I other words,I wish I had bought the Newertech MaxPower Card which I suggest you purchase instead of the Sonnet Card.

For 6400/6500 information, lots regarding the upgrades, OS9, and voodoo2/3 check out the following awesome website:
http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/tmk12v/home.html

Its the 6400Zone and has lots of infor for 6400/6500 users, lots of user posts, upgrade info, take apart manuals, gaming, etc on these machines..Very, very helpful..

As for me I have a 6400 with sonnets upgrade card that has no problems at all...But i did get rid of the internal modem years ago...(the geoport is known to slow down the computer in big ways) also the internal graphics card in the 6500 does act funny with a voodoo3 but can be worked around..check out the site..I think that as long as it works okay without the upgrade it'll work fine with it.

My crescendo300/L2 is like a rock...no conflicts just speed baby.

Check out that website

I have a Sonnet L2/G3 300/512 in my 6500 and so far, touch head, it has been stable. I have no problems running it with a Voodoo3 2000 (yes!), but I acknowledge excellent advice from Speeding and miero on the 3dfx mac pages for setting this up properly to avoid the 2D glitch.
I'm only running system 8.5, but with the latest Crescendo extension from Sonnet I've not heard of OS9 problems. What I can say is that Pod Racer and Unreal are _significantly_ improved by this upgrade, and even Netscape is noticably zippier. Go for it.

I have the Sonnet G3/L2 300/1MB in a 6500/275 Creative Studio and it runs great. Very fast *and* stable (at least with the Crescendo extension 1.4.1). My internal modem still worked, but I yanked it and put in a Farallon 100 MB Comm Slot II ethernet card. The one "gotcha" is the Motion-JPEG video capture card that came with my machine. It relies on the old CPU's speed for its timing so the captured video is just blobs of color when running with the G3. Video capture through the TV tuner works fine.

I've read that there can be problems with a Voodoo 3 card if you don't continue to use the built-in video. I haven't had a chance to try it yet.

Hope this helps.

[Walker]

I installed a Sonnet 300/1024 card into my PowerMac 6500 a while ago. It ran rock solid and I loved the speed increase. Unfortunately, when I installed an ATI Rage Orion card, everything went Kapooie. System crashes everywhere, particularly when using internet. Disabling ATI Graphics Acceleration has totally stopped the related crashes, but slows down my scrolling. I'm able to live with this, but would appreciate any advice on how to fix it. I hooked up another monitor to my old built-in video because I heard this could help, but no such luck (but it is cool having 2 monitors).

Anyway, my advice is to stay away from ATI cards if you have a L2 processor upgrade installed.

[wlonh]

i have put Sonnet G3 L2-slot cards into my sister's 6360 and my nephew's 6500... rock solid... no troubles whatever...

Thanks for the acknowledgement, Grim. I am glad we were able to help.

As for the Sonnet card, I haven't any problems with two cards. The first was a 250/512k. No problems with that except with Voodoo3, which were solved by having another monitor (you can use an adapter too) attached to the on-board ATI. On my present card, a 300/1MB, there no were issues with Voodoo3.

As for ATI cards, don't even bother to get one. I coudln't get 3 of them to work on my 6500, even if I yank my Sonnet out, and with just OS 8.6's base extensions. ATI's tech support didn't even bother to read my first e-mail to them and told me something that I had already done and stated in my e-mail to them on the very first paragraph! Subsequent e-mails to them did nothing for me as they had no solutions for me.

What's worse about ATI was that they had told me BEFORE I bought my first ATI card that their cards had no problems with 6500s, even if an L2 G3 was installed. 3 cards and many e-mails later, they had no solutions for me as to how to solve my problems with it.

And to make matters worse, I bought my first ATI card more than 2 months after they were readily available. IMO, that would have given them time enough to know if there were indeed problems with L2 G3 systems. I really felt like they knew about issues with L2 G3s already, but just didn't want to tell me!

And recently, I read that ATI has found a 60% failure rate with L2G3 systems! They dutifully informed L2G3 users not to use their cards. But for me, I had already formed unpleasant thoughts about them.

Sorry if my post turns out more like an ATI bashing than an actual report of Sonnet L2G3s. You see, I had no problems (other than the V3, but that's working now) with both my Sonnets.

And speaking of V3s, I understand that Sonnets are now work better with it, so you may just not encounter problems with a V3 at all.

Thanks for your patience in reading this super long post. G'day! : )