dillinger wrote:
That's probably the most _unimportant_ aspect of any BPPC card, unless for some strange reason you feel you must have G-Rex support. And who would be silly enough to attach a BPPC card to a busboard that has been known to _fry_ cards in the past. But then I guess you could argue who would be silly enough to pay $750 for ancient electrical hardware too!! :lol: All revisions work perfectly with any other busboard. (Mediator, etc) So anyone who finds value in BPPC board-revision numbers does not know much about the card to begin with.
I'd use Grex1200 over Mediator any day. No 8MB ZII window is a huge advantage, not to mention the local BPPC bus which makes Grex1200 run faster even than Mediator 3000/4000. If you have proper installation spacers for your tower case, a rubber spacer that you paste over one of the CIA chips, and a rubber spacer that you paste over one of the chip ram memory chips (all supplied with Grex), a rev 2 BPPC card updated to Grex 2.2 firmware, supposing that you plug everything correctly, then all will work fine, stable, and nothing will be fried. People who fried their PPC cards were obviously users who never even had a rev 2 BPPC in the first place or didn't correctly plug in the PCI board to the logic board connectors, or didn't have right spacers installed or any spacers at all.
True, Grex is not for everyone as you really need a hard to find rev 2 BPPC card, but if you have it, then there's no reason why not to use it.
Rev 2 PPC cards supposedly also have a better power management system, so they should be more reliable than rev 0 cards. This is in fact one of the reasons why Grex1200 2.2 firmware requires a rev 2 card.
Actually, the most "interesting" thing for me about this particular auction would be the fact that the board was originally a 040 based BPPC which has had a 060 hacked on. If you take a close look at the colour tone of that 060 cpu you will see it is a light mauve colour. Original BPPC card 68k chips were all a much darker tone. They also had "Motorola" printed near the top edge and an angled "half-square" to the left of that, this one doesn't. The 060 chip in this auction is not standard Phase5/DCE issue. Perhaps this is why there are no photos showing the underside of the board where the 060 CPU resoldering job could be seen! :-)
100% agreed on this part. It's obviously a conversion job. The MC68060RC50 chip is a dead giveaway. Perhaps if AmigaFrance did the job, then it may not be so bad at all as JJB does an amazing job with these conversions. He even installs a socket for the 060 chip. ;-)
