Upgrading a
Quadra 900/950

For the serious Mac collector I think a Quadra 950 is an important piece. It's big, heavy and was the pinnacle of Apple technology when it was released in 1992. For me the thing that impressed me the most was the chong when it started up.

Now that's a power supply. With 16 30 pin simm slots and 5 nubus slots you could pack a lot of upgrades into this machine. A 5.25 inch housing was included so that you could have an internal SCSI CD rom. For this option as with all the Macs of this era you needed to have a custom face plate which seems to be a fairly tough item to find..

With 16 simm slots you could install a maximum of 256 mb of ram using 16 mb simms. These chips even today are fairly hard to come by but unlike the SE/30 the Quadras are not quite as finicky about the type of ram they will accept.

Three of the four types of 16 mb 30 pin simms that work in the 900/950. The strip on the top right is a 4 mb chip.

One other upgrade path is included in the Quadra 900/950's. A pds slot which accepts an Apple PowerPC upgrade card. When it first shipped the card was very expensive and really didn't provide a big speed bump. Still if you were building a full on 900/950 for your collection it wouldn't be complete without one of these cards.

Big bucks at the time, but not a worthy speed bump. The PowerMac upgrade card, which required a control panel in order to make it work.

This card could also be used in the Quadra 700, and Centris/Quadra 650. A different version of this card could be swapped into the cpu socket of the LC 475 and LC 630. This card was also slow.

One thing I did notice with this card is that it feels loose in the slot on my Quadra 950.

Ahhh the joy of memory.

and the agony of crappy case design. The weakest link in the 900/950 were these extremely fragile clips that held the side of the case on.

The clip slides on 4 weak tabs, once these snap off the clip falls off and the side can no longer lock itself to the computer. Only Apple can build a bulletproof power supply and give the machine the worlds crappiest method of keeping the thing together.

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