Mac Upgrade?

[digiman57]

Hi all,
I have been using a Mac 9500 150 with the Mix system and 2 older farm cards. I have about 200 MEGs of RAM, Mac OS 8.1 and use Digital Perfomer as my MIDI app.Also use an Adaptec power domain dual SCSI controler. I would love to get more speed out of this system and wondered what I should try first.

What CPU upgrade card would be good to use with the 9500? And how much RAM should i upgrade to before putting PT 5.1 on my system? Would love to not make mistakes on the the CPU upgrade card...
jeff l.

[Conscious Structure]

Go all out on the RAM. It's soooo cheap. You can get like a gig of RAM for like 500 buck now! Not that you need a whole gig unless you're doing lots of video.

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Dave Belazis
Conscious Productions
Conscious Studios

[Didier de Roos]

digiman 57,

whatever you do, don't buy a Sonnet G4. They plain don't work with 6-slot Macs and Pro Tools, unless you don't mind rebooting every 5 minutes...My advice: if you have to upgrade that Mac, choose a medium-fast G3 upgrade (let's say 400 MHz) with 1 MB of cache, and use the XLR8 extension and control panel to tweak it, it works like a charm.
Dave:
<Go all out on the RAM. It's soooo cheap. You can get like a gig of RAM for like 500 buck now!> You've gotta be kidding! We're talking 168-pin DIMMs here! The best price for a 64 MB DIMM I've found in Belgium nowadays is a whopping $180.-!
I guess your 200 MB are way sufficient to use 5.1. There is no point allocating too much memory to the PT application itself, unless you're working with tons of tracks and very long sessions. DAE should be fairly happy around 80-90 MB. I don't know about Digital Performer though: if you want to use simultaneously with PT, you might want to add about 48-64 MB to your 200.
BTW, digiman57, I'm using a similar system to yours with 192 MB RAM: 9600, 1 Mix card, 2 older Farms, Adaptec 2940, and two ATI video cards. Those two have made quite a difference on the old stock IMS twin-turbo.

Hope this helps.

Didier