Upgrading a
Macintosh LC 630

The Macintosh LC 630 and Quadra 630 were interesting 68040 based computers. They were the first to use the then standard IDE bus instead of the normal for Mac SCSI bus for their internal hard drives.

The other interesting feature of the LC 630 were some of it's expansion cards. Not only could the 630 take an ethernet card but also an MPG video card, Apple TV/Video system which let you hook up a broadcast television signal to be viewed on your Mac and a rare DOS card available in the LC 630 DOS which had a 486DX2/66 cpu.

The more common LC 630 versions had a motherboard that would accept a single 72 pin simm. These Macs are able to use the 128 mb simm that works fine in the LC 475 and PowerMac 6100.

A fully loaded 630 motherboard with optional ethernet, MPG video and TV/Video card. The TV/Video card comes in two parts, the second part which is not shown in this photo mounts in a slot above the motherboard and has an external cable input.

Lots of ports on the rear once all the cards are installed. The TV/Video card also sports RCA stereo left and right as well as video inputs.

The 630 with a 128 mb simm and on board ram gives you a grand total of 132 mb of memory. For me the LC 630 was a bit of a dud because of it's ram limitations (36 mb). It wasn't until we discovered a cheap source for 128 mb simms that this Mac was able to show it's true potential. Coupled with a big cheap IDE hard drive this could be a rather interesting part of your Mac computer collection.

Comments? Feel free to e-mail me at kevino@newsroom.net.