9600 to G3 upgrade

[swablar]

I "tech" a lot of Pro Tools systems for people and every G4 upgrade card I've seen has been bad news.. very erratic.
The Newer Technology G3 cards are the most reliable by far.
Mesh, if the Sonnit's are working for you, then congratulations. Personally I have found them fairly unstable, but then again, I do not run into them too often and they may have made improvements since the originals.
Personally, I'd use the Newer Tech G3 or buy the real thing (G3 or G4).

[dan wool]

I keep hearing about layoffs and bankruptcy filings at NewerTech so I'm a little worried about investing in a card for which no tech support is available. I was told xlr8's cards were "%100 compatible" (from a salesperson of course) w/ PT. Any Thoughts?

[Compression Records]

Just installed a PowerLogix G3 400 in my 9600/200. Plug and play. It's much faster with no bugs.

------------------
Marco Marinangeli
Magelic Productions, Inc.
Compression Records
http://www.compressionrecords.com

[bigtree]

I have the exact same rig as well, just ordered the G4 450 by Newer Tech for the 9600, hope I'm not in for a nightmare.

bigtree

[meshtheflesh]

3 months , 3 computers , no hasles yet. Great speed improvment.

[Derek M]

Has anyone tried the Newertech G3 500 with a 9600?

[Orange]

One morning, I went to boot my 9600 and the machine was totally dead. I brought it to my Mac repair and they said the CPU was dead. a replacement CPU was very expensive. For much less money, the repair guy offered me to install a Powerlogix G3/350 that he had in stock. I brought the computer home and it has worked perfectly since then.

CM

[This message has been edited by Orange (edited July 17, 2000).]

[[email protected]]

I just tried the NewerTech G3-500 w/ my 9600/233. The card would work on the initial boot up and then crash after 2-3 minutes and not boot up again. After spending some time with Tech Support they really did not have an answer for me except "it should work". I thought it might be a defective card, but a friend purchased one for his 9500 and had the same problems. I was about to dump it and go with a G3-400, which I know work really well when NewerTech e-mailed me with the following...

The problem is most likely the version of the card=B9s hardware. Our engineer's have made a change to the board design which fixes conflicts with machines
that have six PCI slots, such as the 9500 and 9600. You will probably
benefit if we replace this card with one that has the latest revision.

Just sent it off for replacement. Will let you know if it works. -MT

[HoosierSnd]

A pal and I have three 9500s with Newer G3 300/300 cards and they are wonderfully fast and stable. We did not change any ram and have not really touched the Newer control panels since installation.

Now, having said that, the newest of the three rigs had to have two Newer G3 cards sent back to Newer and replaced before it got one that worked.

An ex-Digi employee told me that the ONLY G3 cards that had the throughput capability to work with PT are the Newer cards... I don't think, given stories from folks who have other accelerators (even tho they don't do audio), that I'd trust any of the others with PT audio.

As for problems at NewerTech, well between the corporate problems and the two bad cards, yeah maybe, but I will buy a G3 400 card this week, and would again. So far, they have been really great and the company has worked well with us when they weren't (just that most recent incident).

I asked in the Tips forum about changing to a Newer G4 card instead of the G3, and it seems that the G4s cards are not nearly as reliable as the G3s...

steveV

[Mark Fassett]

My G3 upgrade stories...

G3/400 on my 9500: I've had it for a year or so now, and it's been great, crash free, once I figured out I had a bad RAM stick..

G3/300 on my 8600: Pro Tools Mix 5.0.1 runs fine on this.. no problems, once I slowed down the cache to the lowest setting. Note, I use this mainly for v/o recording and don't tax it at all..

I just ordered a Newertech G4 500 board for my 9500.. I know there were problems with them in six slot machines, but it appears Newer has a fix. For more details, you can read about it on Newer's site, or www.xlr8yourmac.com. The latter is an excellent resource for those of you who are thinking about upgrading your CPU, they have user databases with reports sorted by manufacturer and computer model. Check it out..