68040 particularities

[Dennis]

My second observation is that the speed benefit of moving from a 68030/50 to a 68040/25 is minimal. Sometimes hardly noticed. Perhaps because of the particularly limited memory bandwith of the BPPC? (IF this is not just a rumour)

I did exactly the same upgrade as you did when I still had my 1200. But to my experience, the 040@25 often felt even slower than the 030@50. Also, if i remember correctly, some 3D games like breathless or ab3d also ran slower on the 040. I still regret selling my blizzard1230-IV. It was the best accelerator I ever owned. After that one, it went downhill. The blizzardPPC/cybervision never worked well in my system (lots of ppc crashes, firmware loss etc..), and the first cyberstorm MKIII in my 3000 died after one year. The second ("repaired" by DCE) died after 3 hours....

Dennis

[Dennis]

My experience a bit different. Going from a B2000 with GVP 68030/40MHz to an A4000/040, the A4K felt nippier in day-to-day use. Going to a WarpEngine@40MHz blew the B2000 out of the water. of course, this was [probably] more due to the on-board DMA SCSI, faster (high data density, lower latency) SCSI drive, and then batter gfx card.

Maybe the blizzardppc was not a very fast design due the bus sharing with the PPC. Also, the blizzard1230 was a very fast design at the time. Maybe the step from a "fast" 030 to a "slow" 040 is not that great a step. The cyberstorm MKIII in my 3000 was VERY fast however. Together with an atlas-IV drive and a cybervision64/3D it was a very nice setup. Too bad MKIII's don't live that long.  :-(

Dennis