dc7600 - More Parts

I've not been able to run the dc7600 surprisingly fast BeOS R5 machine since May, but I have now located one part for it, and ordered another.

At some point I shoved an IDE DVD-RW (with Lightscribe, for those that remember that) in to a drawer on the basis that its unlikely I'd find another one easily. which turned out to be true. I assumed I had dumped it some time ago - but it seems I dumped my spare SATA DVD-RW on the basis that I now have a spare BD-RE drive.

I did want to get that drive working in R5, for the hell of it, but as the SATA controller is in single channel IDE emulation mode for my boot disk, this isn't going to happen anyway; so this should give me writing ability. As even my R5 laptop has a DVD-RW drive, I do use this as a media transfer method quite a bit.

I've also ordered a Matrox G550 PCI-E card - probably the best option, as tracking down the few GeForce cards that are supported by the BeOS drivers, and are also PCI-E, is proving impossible. Its nowhere near as powerful as those cards (that comparison card is probably the very most powerful card with a BeOS driver admittedly), but is more easily available; and has good BeOS drivers with dual head support; albeit my 27" monitor is probably more screen space than my dual 17"s used to be.

If this arrives and works, I'll look for a quieter PSU and newer/quieter fans to make the system less noisy. And I'll try to actually use it rather than just have the fastest BeOS machine around.

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