Sonnet crescendo 7200 on Amiga

[johnklos]

The reason I am interested is I happen to have a PowerMac 7200 with a Sonnet crescendo 7200 fully populated with ram (if you think the sonnet is rare the ram for the sonnet and the 7200 is also very uncommon).

OWC sells 128 meg FPM DIMMs which are compatible with the Crescendo 7200 for $7.50 USD apiece.

[johnklos]

That is good that some one sells them.

These modules are doubly odd, first they are FPM (or Fast Page mode), which was not rare but was a little less common than standard DIMMs

What makes these a bit wacky is the fact they were 5V.  By that time 3.3V was common.

This is a bit interesting because the 3.3V rail is what the sonnet needs to work

All the Power Macs of the time after the first generation NuBus Power Macs before the G3 (except the Power Mac 4400) used 5 volt FPM DIMMs. All the PowerPC CPUs of the time before the G3 took 3.3 or 2.5 volts. It's not surprising that an accelerator card for a Power Mac 7200 would take the same kind of memory as the Power Mac itself. Sonnet even advertised that you could take the memory from the motherboard and use it on the accelerator card.

[johnklos]

I get the FPM (reminds me of the A3000).   But why mac uses the less common 5v than 3.3v.  If these were EDO they would be what servers used during that generation.
It is like they go out of way to be different just to be different.

To be fair, Power Macs started using FPM 5 volt DIMMs before 3.3 volt EDO DIMMs were around and before any servers started using (non-proprietary) 64 bit DIMMs.

@DutchinUSA

Nice Machine!!!  I know this is an Amiga web site but you have to admire some high end macs builds from the 90s.

I have one which is a full time NetBSD server which has run for more than a decade straight. It has a 1 GHz Sonnet upgrade, 1.5 gigs of memory and a 2 TB hardware mirrored SATA enclosure on a SATA-SCSI adapter connected to an 80 MB/sec ATTO SCSI card. Wonderful, high quality hardware!