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Macintosh Quadra 700 Upgrades

The Quadra 700 is a very upgradable machine. The most popular and sought-after upgrade for the Quadra 700 has to be the PowerPC upgrade card, but there are many others as well. Here's a list!

PowerPC Upgrade Card

The PowerPC upgrade card, as the name implies, allows you to get the power of the PowerPC on your Quadra. Performance depends on the card you have, but on later cards made by Sonnet, you could get up to a blazing 100MHz. Still, these cards are very rare today, and you would be lucky to find one, 100MHz or not. Putting a PowerPC upgrade card in your Quadra will yield you the performance of the PowerPC, a new boot chime, and the title of the Power Macintosh 700. A worthy upgrade indeed, if you can find one.


But how do I get an SSD in it?

To get solid-state storage in your Quadra 700, you need a SCSI-2-SD, BlueSCSI, or similar. While pricey, these adapters allow you to replace an unreliable, slow SCSI hard drive with an SD card for blazing-fast performance in the classic Mac OS.


The Forbidden CD-ROM upgrade

It is actually possible to install a CD-ROM drive inside of a Quadra 700. The internal interface is SCSI, so nothing's stopping you from putting one in. If you do decide to perform the forbidden CD-ROM upgrade, good luck getting it back together.

Obviously, this upgrade wouldn't be possible practically speaking, but you can use it as a quick hack if you need to mount a CD and don't have an external drive.