Wanted: 68040!

[Damion]

i also recall, but may be incorrect, that the internal frequency of an 040 is double the external bus speed.

This is exactly correct. The marketed rating of an '040 refers to its bus speed, internal is double its external frequency. (The easily accessible jumper settings for the clk ratio is what makes something like an Apollo 1260 card super easy to overclock with a Rev 6 '060 - old FPM SIMMs generally won't operate at 80MHz, but 40 is no problem.)

From this page:

The main internal units work at twice the clock speed of the bus interface unit. For instance, when processing most instructions internally, a 68040 clocked at 33 MHz effectively runs at 66 MHz.

[Damion]

As far as the popular A1200 040/060 cards, the Apollo had faster chipset access (approaching Blizzard 1230 performance under certain circumstances), but not by a large margin. Fastram performance may also be slightly faster than Phase5/DCE cards at the same memory clock. However, the Blizzard can generally handle a higher memory clock (1/1 cpu/memory at 66MHz+), potentially giving much better fastram performance, whereas the Apollo can barely handle a 50MHz memclock, even with excellent RAM. In my experience, anything above 50MHz and the memory speed must be halved.

By looking at the SysSpeed benchmarks for the big-box cards, it would seem Argus is 100% correct in regard to the Cyberstorms and chipset access (and the MKIII appears to have significantly improved fastram performance). BusTest shows marginally less favorable results, but I have no idea how accurate these benchmarks are at actually determining anything substantial. :shrug: Fun but meaningless, LOL.
 
I've read that the QuikPak/GVP 4060 take advantage of EDO RAM, and pwn the rest in terms of fastram performance.

[Damion]

@Argus

DOH! It's just the QuikPak that utiizes EDO, then? Seems like a nice card. Do you know if any of them actually had SCSI onboard?

@AlexH

Well, one thing to keep in mind is the Apollo 1240 has a slower memory clock, and I'm pretty sure the MKIII should be performing better anyway. Compare it to the MKII 040/40 though, and the scores are much closer. Also, note the difference between the two Apollo 1240 cards, obviously hw and sw setup makes a difference.

You can take a look at this thread for some bustest results from my Apollo card, an MKIII and a few others (again keeping in mind that my memclock is set to 1/2 CPU speed). There's an overclocked Apollo 4060 card in there (100MHz CPU, 50MHz memory) that returned some impressive numbers.

And as far as chipset performance with the A1200 cards, show me a Blizzard that can hit 5 mb/sec in the SysInfo drive benchmark, with an IDE-Fix Express and a memory clock of only 40 MHz. Won't happen. :-P Actually, it would be pretty interesting if we could get someone to run bustest on their Blizzard 1260 card and post it to the thread. Overclocked, the Blizzard should maintain an edge in fastram performance, while the Apollo should return better "chip" numbers.