The PCI Alternatives page

SPARC/Sun Solaris

• NCR53c810: we did test an anonymous board based on an NCR53c810 that I once used on my Athlon to burn CDs. OBP doesn't know anything about this board, but the Solaris glm driver does, so if you need an additional scsi chain on your PCI UltraSparc system without boot capabilities, this can do the job. My Ultra 5 had this one before getting the 53c875 based board.

• NCR53c875: we tested a Compaq labeled PCI card with the above said chipset and actually my Ultra 5 boots its Solaris 9 system from it. You can probe-scsi-all, boot, all usual stuff. Its PCI-ID is probably hard-coded into the OBP so it works. We were able to test only the 50 pin channel altough the board has an UW too, we are in a shortage of UW cables and disks :) (sadness: now this board is happily booting and running solaris 9 from the UW channel in my U10 :) , tested internal and external connector)

• NCR53c875+PCNet32: It seems that OBP is very happy with this chipset. It happened to me to find a Digital board with such a chip on herself and also a 10/100 Am79C970 PCnet Ethernet. This board has external SE 50pin and internally both the SE 50pin and 68pin Ultrawide. I was so curious about it that I decided it was time to move the Ultra5 to the wide channel, and with a bit of test and try with termination and scsi madness now my Ultra 5 boots directly from a 18Gb drive on the wide channel. And after 10 minutes tweaking with SUNWddk, even the PCnet board was running with an astonishing ae0 plumbed, no snooping capability but who cares :)

• Several network cards: It came to our attention that there are several network drivers available for PCI cards like Realtek 8139, Tulip based ones, 3Com 3C905 and others. Altough we did not test them, that does not mean they don't work. You probably will not be able to netboot from them since they have no FCode, but if this is not a requirement you are ok. As always time and resources are not often available. Send us some PCI Ultrasparc boxes and we'll test'em !!

• Gain some Mhz on UltraSparcs: Yeah, overclocking your USII box is very easy, you don't even need to open it. Simply go OBP and play with also hidden nnn at-speed parameters. With .speed you will be able to see how fast you are going (if your box supported the overclock). If the box freezes, turn off and on and try to lower the nnn parameter. My Ultra 5 270Mhz now reports:

  
  bash-2.05# prtdiag -v
  System Configuration:  Sun Microsystems  sun4u Sun Ultra 5/10 UPA/PCI (UltraSPARC-IIi 297MHz)
  System clock frequency: 99 MHz
  Memory size: 256 Megabytes

  ========================= CPUs =========================

                      Run   Ecache   CPU    CPU
  Brd  CPU   Module   MHz     MB    Impl.   Mask
  ---  ---  -------  -----  ------  ------  ----
   0     0     0      297     0.2   12       1.2
   

  ... and so on .. Don't forget to nvstore the also hidden command within your nvramrc !! And also, before going too high, be sure to test the system robustness, you probably don't want your system to do strange things during your daily work ... (sadness: tested and verified also in my 333Mhz U10, now running at the top speed also-hidden is capable to set in this machine : 370Mhz)

Alpha/Digital Unix 4.0e

• S3 Trio64V+: my AlphaServer 1000 has an integrated Cirrus Logic with 512K. I never use it in console, but fitting a common S3 Trio64V+ gives you the opportunity to go at least 1024x768 at 8 bit. Mine has 2Mb of VRAM, never tested the 24bit mode. You will need to relink Digital Unix kernel. For what it's worth the effort, you don't even need to reprogram its bios and you get a fasteer console than the integrated CL54xx (which by the way you need to disable with an EISA reconfiguration diskette if you have an AS1000). P.S.: Digital Unix 5.x didn't even had to relink the kernel as I had to do in 4.x

• Intel 8225x (aka Eepro100): Well, this system was lacking a decent network connection altough the standard 10Mbit board on it performed very well. So hack and search and google and read the man pages (mostly !) and I discovered that Digital Unix supports also this kind of boards. A kernel relink and 5 minutes later I had netperf showing me full 100Mbit performance with this nice card.

PowerPC/AIX 4.3.3

• S3 Trio64V+ (modded): When I got my first RS/6000 (a 43P 240), it came without a video board. Feeling curious, we modded a standard S3 with 2Mb of VRAM replacing its BIOS with the one coming from a GXT110P. Guess what ? It works. Now I have a marvellous 1024 x 768 at 8 bit on a dual processor system :)

• Matrox Millenium (MGA 1164SG-A): Even more curious, I tried to put in the above PC BIOS based matrox into the 43P-240. The result is that you don't see anything at the openfirmware level, but when AIX boots it recognizes it as a GXT150P. Wonderful, an 8Mb VRAM board still working at 1024x768 8 bit ....

• IBM 16/4 Token Ring PCI Adapter2 (34L061) : What happens when you are not able to find a decent network card for a crappy operating system ? You try to find alternatives. So ok, 16/4 Token Ring is nowadays not such a beast but it performs better than ethernet. I already have a Token Ring in my gateway connected to a black UTP MAU so I placed this board into my 7043 and with a bit of PTFs from IBM it worked very well. The board is a 34L061 P/N 31L3520. Unfortunately my 7043-240 (now with a cool GXT800P onboard) fails with a 7D7 on its panel, I think it's something related to this 2-slot beast, any hint is welcome.

PowerPC/MacOS

• Matrox Millenium: the same board tested on AIX, with BIOS coming from the Matrox web site (OpenFirmware ones) works onto my PowerMac 7500 which come without VRAM at all. The interesting thing is that on the Mac, this board gives you true color. Once placed into the AIX box, it gave the same result as using the PC BIOS. So it seems that OF BIOS of the GXT150 for RS/6000 boxes is different from the Matrox OF ones. (sadness: i've tested this board also with osx in my beige g3 and it worked very well, not very fast at res of 1600x1200 (i used it to drive an apple 21' studio display) but usable)

• Realtek 8139: Want a cheap 10/100 mbit board for your PCI Macintosh ? These have even drivers for MacOS 8.x/9.x from Realtek itself (a serious vendor IMHO) and even for Mac OS/X. My Beige G3 with Jaguar runs very well with one of these boards and even my 7500 with 8.6 is very happy with that one. Ok, maybe it's well known stuff, but who knows ?

• 3DFX Vodoo 2: Ok, I had this crappy board laying around, it does not have a BIOS on it and thought "Why should'n run on the last empty slot of my 7500 ?" Obviously it runs, you have to crawl with google for drivers and software to use it, but it works ! I don't have a Vodoo 3 but it _should_ work the same.

• CMD670B USB: Uhm, you said you have an USB Scanner but no USB ports on your PCI Mac? Well, my G3 is happy with one of these boards allowing me to use my Epson Perfection 1240U scanner even from OS/X (but it works also in OS 8.x/9.x, if you apply the right patches from Apple).

• Adaptec 2940UW: Well, I _hate_ empty PCI slots on my systems so this Powermac 9500 with the 10MB/sec MESH SCSI onboard (and 6 slots !) was really going to need a decent SCSI controller. Guess what ? You get the firmware, you reflash and you get an UW channel for Mac at PC price. I don't use it for bootstrap, send me a decent UW disk and I'll try. Beware that some Adaptec 2940UW came with slower flash roms so with somes of them you will have no luck (except if you replace the smaller flash with a bigger one). (sadness: from my experience the board is booting fine from the UW channel in linux and macos classic (up to 9.2.2), instead osx can use the board and disk attached to it but can't boot from them, google report varius contrasting experience with this board under osx, we will investigate further ...)

Vax/Vms

• VS2000 integrated ncr scsi: well, if you have a vaxstation 2000 you know how much is hard to find an st-506 disk of a decent size compatible with the controller on the machine, and this is a big problem specially if your vs2000 came with no disk or dead disk inside (not so rare, especially with an rd54). You also (hopefully) know the existence of a scsi controller chip with an internal scsi II (50 pin idc) port in the machine, specifically an ncr 53c90. This controller is officially only used to connect a tk50z tape to the vs2000, and there's no support for booting or using other scsi device attached to it under firmware console (chevron) or vms operating system, officially ... Using the pk2k (Wolfgang J. Moeller) driver is possibile to use any scsi device on this controller under varius versions of openvms (from 5.5 to 7.2 if i rember correctly), there's also a firmware patch for booting from scsi disk attached to the vs2000, the patch require you to have a dump of the correct version of firmware rom, patch that dump, and reprogram the eeprom on the mb (4x 27c512) doing this will give you a perfectly usable scsi controller on the vs2000 like a vs3100 (which share the same scsi chipset). Enjoy your new scsi controller :)