The Macintosh Quadra 700 is Pretty Cool

追加: 2026-05-05

[00:00:10]Hey dorks, 1990's been done to death on this channel, mainly because of the trifecta of creamy machines that October.

[00:00:17]>> [music] >> But in March of that year, Apple also released the fastest Mac at the time, the Macintosh IIfx. [music] Of course, it had a high price tag at $9,000 for the base model, but it was specifically aimed at professionals [music] and was meant for companies to put in a purchase order for and negotiate a better price.

[00:00:37]With a 40 MHz 68030, this was definitely the fastest clocked Mac, but just 1 year later, a pair of machines were poised to knock it off the performance podium.

[00:00:46]These computers would come with a new Motorola 68040 CPU, which featured an internal cache and integrated floating-point unit.

[00:00:55]When rumors of these new machines began circulating, one of them was going to be a large tower resembling a Unix workstation, and the other a smaller desktop mini tower that appeared to be a modified version of the case used for the IIcx and the IIci.

[00:01:09]The large tower [music] was thought to be the Macintosh IIex, and the smaller one was as of then unnamed.

[00:01:16]As the months passed, the rumors became more accurate and the machines were officially part of their own new line instead of being added to the existing Macintosh II category.

[00:01:25]The large one became the Quadra 900 and the smaller one the Quadra 700. [music] They both came with built-in networking, a brand new faster SCSI controller, and a new generation and new bus slot, which promised faster [music] speeds. But it turns out these speed increases really only applied for card-to-card communication as opposed to card-to-CPU work.

[00:01:47]Both machines came with onboard video, negating the need for a video card. The 900 had 16 RAM slots, making it possible to run it with 256 megs of RAM.

[00:01:58]The 700 on the other hand maxed out at 68 megs with four onboard and four slots for SIMs.

[00:02:04]While the power was certainly there upon launch, there were availability problems for the 700. Dealers would only get a demo unit, if that.

[00:02:13]Aside from availability, there was another problem at launch. Lots of software of the day just refused to run on the 68040 because the cache worked differently than on older Mac computers.

[00:02:23]Programs would crash or be generally unstable until they got updated, which wasn't so simple back in the day of floppy disk installs. Many times those update disks had to be requested from the developers.

[00:02:35]Apple did provide an 040 cache switch control panel that would help that sort of software work again, but then it was no faster and sometimes even a little bit slower than if it were being run on a 68030.

[00:02:47]Thankfully, this period of incompatibility, while highly reported, was short-lived. Almost everything that needed an update got one within a few months.

[00:02:57]While the Quadra 700 uses a very similar case design to that of the IIci and the IIcx, there are some [music] minor differences.

[00:03:04]The case is intended to be used in the tower configuration, and some aesthetic changes were made to the case to make it look good that way.

[00:03:12]The vents along the front changed orientation, as well as the branding.

[00:03:16]The reset and interrupt buttons on the front were also rounded off, and the ports on the back were adjusted to accommodate the new AAUI networking port.

[00:03:25]If you like this kind of [music] tomfoolery, maybe like the video and subscribe to the channel. And if you want behind-the-scenes and ad-free early access to my videos and projects and stuff, [music] I've set up a Patreon.

[00:03:36]It's only three bucks and there's some neat stuff up there, including all the music I use on the channel without all the yapping I do over it. The link is in the description.

[00:03:45]For some reason, >> [screaming] >> the resale value of this machine is a bit much.

[00:03:50]Sold listings on eBay are around 200 US for broken machines [music] and 500 and up for working models.

[00:03:57]When my friend Backus gave me the deal of a lifetime on a Quadra 700, I jumped at the chance, and I'm glad I did.

[00:04:04]This one I've got here definitely showing some signs of age. It's pretty yellow, there's some sticker residue, and the lid has a few battle scars, but overall it's not bad. A good clean and a retro bright will probably make this thing look nice.

[00:04:18]One really nice thing about the Quadra 700 is that the capacitors are all tantalums.

[00:04:23]This means they aren't going to leak and ruin the board.

[00:04:26]The main source of destruction for these boards comes from battery damage or generally just bad storage, like keeping them in a damp garage or a barn or something.

[00:04:36]Pulling the power supply out of these can be kind of a pain. Just like the IIci or IIcx, the drive carrier holds it in. You've got to push a little clip out of the way with one hand and pull up with the other.

[00:04:48]These power supplies are also shared with lots of other Macs, the IIcx, IIci, IIvx, Quadra 650, Power Macintosh 7200, and probably some others.

[00:04:58]They can be a real pain to refurbish, too. Not going to do that today, just going to hope this one's all right.

[00:05:06]Apple put a protective sleeve around the floppy drive in all the machines that had this form factor. I'm sure they meant well, but with the floppy drive being the main air inlet for the entire machine, it ends up sucking in a lot of dust, and the sleeve forces all of that dust to clog the drive.

[00:05:21]These almost always need servicing now.

[00:05:28]If you tug at the board just right after removing the buttons and speaker, you'll be able to get it out. Just wiggle it a bit until it lets loose.

[00:05:37]This machine has a 25 MHz 68040, but I'm going to see how it does with a 33 MHz part instead.

[00:05:44]Switching out the CPU isn't enough to get it to run at 33, though. We're going to have to pop out the 50 MHz oscillator here and replace it with a 66 MHz one.

[00:06:03]Here's the new battery.

[00:06:08]Okay, so now I'm going to need some VRAM. This board has six slots, so I'm going to fill them all up. But I like doing things the hard, annoying, and cheap way, so I hit up my friend Justin D. Morgan for some spare VRAM SIM PCBs and chips and decided to build them myself.

[00:06:45]>> [music] [music] >> Let's get this memory in there. Along with the VRAM, I've also got 64 megs of system RAM to put in.

[00:07:20]And the blue SCSI along with this nifty SD card extension dealy that goes to a rear slot cover.

[00:07:32]Benchmark time. Let's see how this thing does at the stock 25 MHz.

[00:07:42]>> [music] [music] >> Not bad. How about 33?

[00:07:54]>> [music] >> Nice. [music] A 30% increase in the benchmark scores.

[00:08:07]So, what can I actually do with this thing? I have a Color Classic Mystic for fun, [music] general-purpose fast 68k Mac stuff, and I have a Plus and an SE/30 for early Mac stuff. It'd be kind of ideal for running A/UX, though.

[00:08:21]In an effort to be taken a bit more seriously and gain government contracts, [music] Apple announced their own version of Unix that would run on select Macs, as long as they had an FPU and a memory management unit.

[00:08:33]It continued to receive updates from 1988 to 1995.

[00:08:38]The unique thing about A/UX is that from a user's perspective, it's just like running a Macintosh.

[00:08:43]It has all the same user interface as the Mac that you're used to, but there's also a command line and all the Unixy stuff.

[00:08:50]I was lazy and didn't feel like servicing the gross floppy drive in here, so instead I used a FloppyEMU. But since there's no external floppy port on the back, I had to run a long cable out one of the slots to my FloppyEMU to boot up to the installer.

[00:09:04]I've got a brand new blank drive image set up on the blue SCSI. We're going to need to format and partition it.

[00:09:11]A/UX is going to want a small Mac partition for the boot environment, a swap partition for virtual memory, and the main partition for the OS itself.

[00:09:21]The Mac can't boot directly to A/UX. It needs to set up a minimal install of System 7 to boot to, which will then be handed off to A/UX.

[00:09:33]I'm just going to go ahead and pick everything here.

[00:09:38]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> And here we are, a command line on a Mac in 1991.

[00:10:20]Pretty cool.

[00:10:22]>> [music] [music] >> Neat.

[00:10:33]But it turns out that it's not all that useful.

[00:10:36]Let's go back into regular Macintosh system software and try something special.

[00:10:41]My friend Garth Beagle lent me an interesting card for this machine, a PowerPC 601 upgrade card that's compatible with this and various other machines like the Quadra 610 and 650.

[00:10:52]Of course, I'm an idiot and forgot to shoot any interesting footage of the actual card, so I asked him to send me some footage I could use. He said no, so I just ripped his whole video about it and put it here. Enjoy.

[00:11:04]The Quadra 700 though is one of only a few different Macs that can do three distinct boot-up chimes. We've all heard this sound.

[00:11:14]If you have a PowerPC card installed, it has its own boot-up chime. Let's get one installed.

[00:11:27]And it sounds like this with a PowerPC card installed.

[00:11:34]And then there's this.

[00:11:39]The Quadra 700 has an alternate boot beep built into its ROM. You can set it using this boot beep control panel.

[00:11:45]You can either choose between the default boot beep, which we all know and love, or the secret one hidden in the ROM.

[00:11:55]Now, to me that sounds a lot like the chime from a 25th anniversary Macintosh, which sounds like this.

[00:12:01]>> [music] >> Along with the Quadra 700, apparently the Quadra 800 and 950 can also do the alternate boot beep. I didn't know this.

[00:12:09]I thought it was a kind of a neat thing, so I thought I'd share it with everybody.

[00:12:12]Whatever.

[00:12:14]Uh okay, thanks, Crockers.

[00:12:18]For more hard-hitting tech journalism, check out Garth Beagle's YouTube channel.

[00:12:24]Let's check out the performance and see how it compares with my overclocked 68040.

[00:12:28]Normally, this upgrade card runs at whatever your system's bus speed is, and at stock, the bus is 50 MHz, but I have my 66 MHz oscillator installed, so we'll be squeezing a little bit more performance out of this card.

[00:12:42]Quite a boost here.

[00:12:44]The CPU score is nearly three times higher, and the math score is five times higher.

[00:12:49]Graphics are only a little bit faster, but that's to be expected. The graphics hardware is basically untouched.

[00:12:55]Of course, you can't run A/UX while using this card, but it would definitely be an affordable way to extend the life of these super expensive machines in the mid-90s.

[00:13:04]Plus, look what it changed the name of the machine to in the about dialog.

[00:13:11]For Marchintosh this year, I ran this machine 24/7 with the PowerPC card and used it as my GlobalTalk router.

[00:13:19]GlobalTalk is basically taking an AppleTalk network and routing it over the internet, so every March, all us Mac geeks get on GlobalTalk and send each other goofy files to our file shares and weird pictures to each other's printers.

[00:13:32]Check out marchintosh.com/globaltalk for more information.

[00:13:37]Well, all that was fun and everything, but man, this case is really dirty and yellow. Let's do something about it.

[00:13:44]I just cleaned these things with soapy water at first, making sure I clean out all the little slots.

[00:13:53]Then I attack it with a magic eraser. I don't go too nuts with it because it can ruin the texture.

[00:13:59]Now it's time for Retrobrite.

[00:14:09]I used this bin with some UV LEDs. It takes about 24 hours.

[00:14:15]Well, it looks nice, and I've got a really neat, fast 68K machine to go back on my shelf and get forgotten about.

[00:14:23]It's a really neat machine for the collection, but I don't really see myself using it all that much.

[00:14:28]That might be good to keep in mind if you're interested in getting one of these.

[00:14:32]If you want a fast, rock-solid 68K machine to play with and don't care about the collector cachet of having a Quadra 700, you might look into the Centris or Quadra 650. It's a very similar machine aside from the case, and it's significantly cheaper.

[00:14:47]On the other hand, very few Macs look as cool as the 700. It all depends on what you're after.

[00:14:53]I didn't focus a lot on whether this machine was worth having back when it was new because regular people weren't buying [music] these.

[00:14:59]This is something that your school or employer would buy for you to get work done.

[00:15:04]The only faster Mac at the time would be the Quadra 900 it was introduced with.

[00:15:08]It was a hell of a machine back then, and it's still a really neat system today.

[00:15:15]Thanks for watching. If you'd like to see me do more stupid stuff with computers, stay tuned.

[00:15:22]>> [music]