What are your experiences with the 9500?

I got my first 9500 in the summer of '05. It has been configured as a server of some sort and it came with a full height 18 GB Seagate Barracude internally and two U2W SCSI 9 GB Barracudas externally hooked up via an Adaptec 2940U2W controller. It also came with 256 MB of RAM. Unfortunately, it was still the original 132 MHz CPU (though a printed label on the outside said it was 233 MHz).

This was my first experience with the 9500. I have to say that I love the industrial design, but I hate the guts. It's a massive machine that stands tall and impressive. It has a look of power that I don't think the 9600 and 8600 cases have. But man oh man, installing ANYTHING in it is a pain in the butt! Anyway, this champ is a pretty sweet performer. I've dropped in a G3/400 MHz CPU, 498 MB of RAM, configured the external drive as a RAID, pulled the internal drive (which was dead anyway), and installed OS X on a smaller internal hard drive.

In fact, that very same 9500 is running this website.

What are your experiences with the 9500? Share your "After Action Reports" on that machine...

Peace,
Drew

I got my 9500 from my dad last year. It was a 180MP but it did have a Sonnet G3 400MHz upgrade in it. I added a Radeon7000 and MacPicasso860(yumm... !3D override! ) and upgraded the RAM to 704MB (interleaved).
I put in the ZIF Carrier with a B&W 350MHz G3 I had laying around, OC´d it to 413MHz and pushed the bus to 59MHz. It ran stable even with interleaved RAM! - but only with some extra cooling. I added two 80mm fans for RAM cooling, a 60mm fan to CPU heatsink and a heatsink to the RAM controller. The baby was incredible loud and didn´t fit its case. I tried a big PC case but was not able to fit all the guts inside.
I used the 9500 mainly for OS9 gaming.OSX10.3.9 did work very well but did not shut down properly.
Later I downgraded everything except the RAM and gave it back to my dad cause he needed it for work.
-got a G3MT instead -

I bought mine, the first full tower (and Old World Power) Mac that I had owned, in mid-2003. It came from a pre-press company, and its price of AUD200 (which was my offer, not their asking) now seems over-generous. Its RAM complement (144MB) and processor speed (132MHz) were miserable, but it had a Radius ThunderColor 30/1600 video card (natch, given its previous use), and was in excellent cosmetic condition.

I replaced the RAM, eventually reaching 1024MB, which was distinct overkill, and certainly got VM's knickers into a knot until I assigned enough RAM to cache to pacify VM. Even then I rarely use VM in any machine unless I am forced to do so. With a MAXpowr G3/400MHz daughter card and new logic board (both NOS), 24x CD-ROM drive, 2 x IBM 9GB and 1 x IBM 18GB 68-pin HDDs, Adaptec 2940U2W, combo FireWire/USB card, ATI Rage Pro and AsantéFAST NIC, and running OS 9.1 it drove a 17-in. Studio display. Now that I have taken apart and upgraded 50-odd x500 towers of that design I have to consider the task just plain tedious rather than a pain. I have more reservation about the design and plastics of the front pressswitch, removing and replacing which is always fraught with risk of breaking the retaining tangs.

The 9500 was a valuable member of my LAN for three years, as backup for the System installations, and download/distributor for the new software, for a dozen or more 68K Macs, as well as being my principal OS 9 machine when I put the iMacs under OS X at the end of 2004. Gotta love the Studio Display for wave editing of sound. Then I acquired an 8600/200 in mid 2006. As a 9600/400 now, that Mac wears much of the goodies from the 9500, which is at the moment, like an actor, 'resting' between engagements.

de
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(60x) 13DT + 3PB + PTPro; (G3) 7DT/MT; (G4) 3T + PB. System 8.1 to OS 10.5.8

The 8500/9500 case is the worst for upgrading. When I'm ready, I am going to gather all the parts needed to max mine out, open it up once, then never open it again. I have an 8600/250 and two beige G3's and they are the nicest old world Macs to work on. The G3/7500/7300/7600/7200 desktop case is also nice.

I'll add my configuration to the list. Bought this 9500 off eBay for $40 about 2 years ago. Came with a G4-800 card, 960MB of FPM RAM, a couple of HD's, an external CD burner, an external DAT drive that I can't find drivers for, and two extended keyboards, one of which was unused in original packaging.
It now has a pair of 15K RPM HD's, an 18GB Hitachi and a 36GB Seagate, Rage 128 and Voodoo 3Dfx video cards driving a pair of LCD monitors, 10/100 Ethernet card, and an Adaptec 2940UW card driving the HD's.
It's a very fast OS 9.2.2 box but does have a couple of annoying glitches.

I agree with everyone else that the case is horrible to work on; you have to virtually disassemble the machine to change the Pram battery or add Ram.