Magma 7 PCI slot expansion chassi on a 6400
This page contains all the info I have gathered on using a PCI expansion chassis with a 6400. It also includes all the hardware I installed in mine :)
Return to The 6400 Zone Home page
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Magma 7 PCI slot expansion chassi on a 6400
This page contains all the info I have gathered on using a PCI expansion chassis with a 6400. It also includes all the hardware I installed in mine :)
Return to The 6400 Zone Home page
Its finally been done. Someone bought one of these PCI slot expansion chassi's and hooked it up to a 6400. Well it was me! Yes I bought one last week and just hooked it up today. I am very pleased with the results and will have a review of it soon.
Let me just give you a sneek peek at what I did. I ordered a refurb Magma 7 PCI slot expansion chassi that also has three external 5.25" and two 3.5" drive bays with one 3.5" bay internal. It comes with a 200W power supply. Basically its a tower PC case with a mother board that has nothing but 8 PCI slots (one slot is dedicated for a card that connects the host computer to the chassi). The refurb was $750 which is cheap for a PCI expansion kit but still rather steep for most! I bought it because I wanted more than just 2 PCI slots and it was the cheapest of all. I could have gotten a new 4 slot system for $1400 but I think 7 slots for $750 was a better deal. The ony difference is that this chassi is only PCI 2.0 compliant (as is the 6400) and the latest ones are PCI 2.1 compliant. basically it means that I can't run any PCI cards that require 3.3v. Only 5v cards will work.
Well I had to stuff something inside so I put in my Micropolis 2G drive and a new CD-R from ClubMac. Oh did I forget to mention I got this :) Its an external 4x24 CD-R with a TEAC drive mechanism. It was $329 and comes with Adaptec Toast.
Wait there's more. I had to connect them somehow so I got an Adaptec 2930CU Ultra narrow SCSI card. It can handle 20MB per sec thruput. Well over what I need and was only $99.95 from CompUSA. I also got an ADS USB PCI card with Logitech's USB wheel mouse. Its the 3 button mouse with a wheel in the middle for scrolling. I had to download drivers for both the USB card and the mouse as they do not come with Mac drivers in the box at this time. ADS's card works with Apples USB development kit with a little tweak. Check out this web site on how to tweak it. After this, the drivers should work with any USB card. The ADS card was only $39.99 from CompUSA, less then most other USB cards. Logitechs mouse drivers will enable the wheel and allow other functions to be asigned to the buttons. At this time I have not been able to get a good connection to their site so the mouse buttons all just do single clicks right now.
As you can see I now have 3 PCI cards in my system. the ATI video card, a USB card, and a SCSI card. I have broken the 2 slot limit :) I will be putting more cards in once my wallet recooperates! Like I said expect reviews from all of these to come.
4/6/2000 Voodoo2 card installed: Click here to read about my Voodoo2 card install eperiences with the Magma chassis.
6/16/2000 Update: I just wanted to tell you the state of my chassis and 6400. I have reconfigured both to use them as a server for my house :) Below is my system configuration at the time of this writting:
6400/180:
Magma Chassis:
As you can see the 6400 is just a little better then stock as I didn't need a G3 for it to be a server. The Chassis still has plenty of slots open for more cards but I doubt I will add any more? No need to at this time. I also have a few SCSI ID's left to add more drives which I might do. But maybe I will add a PCI-IDE card to get one of those very large and inexpensive IDE drives :)