How to rip a Blizzard

[Jose]

So have any of you been brave enouph to rip of a Blizzard 1260/50 and put in a 60mhz 060?Or have someone do it? If so I'd like advice as to if you changed the cristal, etc.
I'm asking this cause I noticed that Eyetech are now selling Apollos at 66mhz, with 60mhz 060s they were able to acquire.
Curiously, they also say the previous ones sold by them and other sellers were overclocked 50mhz's.
Maybe it's not worth to risk it, but it'd be cool if it worked :-D

[Damion]

Mine is a Blizzard 1260/66, and th 060 is actually
a 60mhz chip(I checked :-)). AFAIK you can just
swap your 50mhz crystal with a 66mhz crystal, as long
as you put a heatsink/fan on it. You can get a real
nice fan from CompUSA, a 486 fan made by Startech.
You have to slightly modify one of the raised edges on
the heatsink, but it's real quiet, especially at
7.5 volts. I also used some CPU thermal gel, and no
matter how hard I drive the 060 the air blowing from the
fan is always cool. If you're lucky, I understand you
may even be able to get away with 75 or 80mhz.  

[Jose]

"If you're lucky, I understand you
may even be able to get away with 75 or 80mhz."

That's on 060 chips with the reference ending with an A. There are some (rare) A ones at 60mhz. That's why I wanted to rip off mine and get one of those if I'm lucky.
So has anyone really tried that?
 :-D

[Damion]

OK, sorry for preaching to the choir then! :-)

[Castellen]

Do the 66MHz 060s have the FPU and MMU enabled?

I knew Motorola made these devices in speeds higher than 60MHz, but
from what I could gather they did not have an FPU.

They produced 75MHz versions of the 68LC060 and 68EC060.

Just wondering if there are any versions of the full 060 faster than
60MHz?

[Jose]

Cool anyway. Maybe it's not worth it. The software I wanted to create for the 68k will be too slow anyway, probably, and what good is me having a fast enouph machine if everybody else doesn't? . I'll have to learn some heavy programming first :-D  (Don't ask me what the idea is :-D )

[Jose]

@Castellen:
they're 60mhz chips running at 66mhz I think. Check motorola's site they have that info.

[Damion]

I would try it anyway, it sounds like a fun
project. Mine unfortunately is not the 'A'
version, but I'm still going to try 75mhz one
of these days, or at least 70.

[Jose]

here is the info on Motorola's site.

[Castellen]

Thanks for the info.
I see Motorola sell them in lots of 1000, but they offer "sample
packs" which are usually just a few devices at a heavily reduced
price, sometimes even free.
That's so engineers and developers can "sample" the product in
prototypes before they use them in mass production.

Now I just need to convince our NZ Motorola semis dealer that I'm
thinking of engineering an 060 into my next project :-)

[Rob]

I have tried running an 060/60 chip at 80Mhz on my blizzard.  At first
it seemed to be booting but then it just reset itself constantly.  I
tried accesing the early startup menu and soon discovered that it was
crashing when setpatch was run.  After some more experimenting I
discovered that aything that enabled the FPU would crash the system.

Prior to putting the 80Mhz crystal in I had put a modified Pentium 1
heatsink and fan on the chip and it didn't even feel warm to the
touch.  After some reading up I discovered that the FPU is not really
capable of running at as high speeds as the integer unit.  This is why
the 75Mhz version do not have an FPU.

I managed to run a couple of demo that didn't require the FPU and I
was quite impressed with the results.  I think the WB3.1 floppy booted
the system OK so I think setpatch from OS 3.1 is okay and it may just
be a problem with later versions such as 3.9.

I think 70mhz is a safe bet although It may be worth trying 75mhz if
you can get the oscilators cheap enough, I had to pay over £10 for my
80mhz unit so I wasn't too keen to experiment further.