[sunrunnerfire]

Ive got a PowerMac 6500 sitting around the house and I am trying to decide what to do with it....anybody have a useful suggestion for it? Seems such a waste to have such a big paperweight.

[Vanquish]

do you have more than 1 other mac ? and maybe a few printers ?, you could just use it as a Print/file server so you can continue working while printing something huge without your computer slowing down.

[ericdelangen]

media server... it's got an ide bus, replace the old hard drive with something huge and keep all your mp3s and mpegs on it. That's what I do with mine. It can serve as a print server at the same time.

[DrBoar]

Have some networked game on it and invite someone over for a game and some beers. Games like Unreal will need to run in very low res but what the heck.

[catzilla1228]

I am using a 6400/G3 with a 10/100 ethernet card as my server. It is running 9.2 and plays very well with the rest of my OS X network. It does seem kind of slow sometimes.

[ThePowerToBurn]

You could put in a nice size hard drive with all of your MP3's on it. Remember, the 6500 has a built in subwoofer, great for playing music on.

[Zimmerman]

The subwoofer in the 6500/6400 macs are just a full range 2" speaker 3watts, 4ohms in a resonating chamber. I know because I have one and popped that baby out to see if I could upgrade it since it gets way overdriven at loud+low. There is plenty of power there since it was able to run a 16w 4 ohm 4" speaker I had taken out of my car. There are shielding issues if you want to upgrade the speaker in addition to finding better 2" speakers than the one Apple included. I looked and trust me, you can't find em'. Not at 2" and better quality. You can rob one out of a PC, but they are crap. It does sound nice, but not like a 2.1 Boston Acoustics system.

PS. My 6500:

A 6400/180 case, a 6500/225 board, a sonnet 300mhz L2 upgrade overclocked to 350mhz, 64mbx2 RAM, a 3dfx Voodoo 5500 64mb PCI card (26fps avg in UT - 640x480+low quality, 18fps avg at 800x600 at high quality) a 2port PCI USB, 10baseT CommII ethernet card, CD-RW, 7200rpm WD 40gb HDD... nice system. It benchmarks close to a 350 B&W in Norton Utilites. I soldered leads into the internal power supply to automatically turn on a 50w external CD-RW drive power supply that I made internal to ease the load of this system on the stock power supply. Turely a Frankenmac.

[catzilla1228]

How do you OC the Sonnett G3 L2?

[Zimmerman]

there is a little app called Sonnet Clocker that adjusts the multiplier in the Sonnet Extension. You can usually increase the multiplyer safely by at least .5, sometimes 1 with out any adverse effects. I had a Sonnet L2 300. It's multiplier settings were 50(bus speed)x6=300mhz The Sonnet Clocker App changed the multiplier to 50 x 7 = 350mhz -whee! You can definately tell the difference, especially when starting up and playing games.

If you push it too much your computer will just freeze in the middle of whatever and you'll have to restart with the extensions off and open SonnetClocker and adjust the setting. If you keep the unit cool, you can run faster longer. I actually got the better part of the way through Norton Utilities System Info Bencmarks with my 300mhz all the way up to 400mhz using a can of air blowing directly on the L2 upgrade, but I ran out and it overheated quickly. NOTE: Pushing a processor over its standard setting can damage it if used for very long! Use at your own risk!
Here is the link:

http://www.zone6400.com/Sonnet_Clocker.html

[catzilla1228]

Thanks Zimmerman.
I tried the Sonnet overclocker and got my 6400/300/1meg up to 320, no matter what I set it to it ran at 320. I shouldn't complain, 20mhz for nothing.
Perhaps I'll play a little more later....