Blizzard PPC stability problems

[OldSkool]

Hi you all,

I'm a beginner on the Amiga front. There are some stability problems with my recently bought BPPC. I have the following setup:

OS 3.9 (boing bag 1 and 2 installed)
BPPC 040 (cooler and fan) doesn't get hot
PC power supply 300 watt
1 memory module of 128 mb
internal 2,5" harddrive

In the bios I played with the memory setting a bit and found that:

70 ns: very unstable
60 ns: improved stability
free config: best stability (but not stable enough)

The system still freezes randomly. Any ideas or advice is helpfull.

I already tried the following:

Additional cooling PPC (including fan): no effect
Diskdrive power direct from power supply: no effect

[Brian]

Genneraly run the memmory at the speed of your simm, if overclocking setting the simm speed to a slower rate than what the simm is marked for might be needed. I imagine this isn't an overclocked unit so set that aside.

When I had a BPPC040 in my system together with a 3.5" HD and an external floppydrive powered by an 250W PSU the mouse sprite wuold become more and more jumpy as the CPU intensityload got higher... didn't catch the problem untill a few days later when my harddrive actualy spun down and up again freezing my computer when I accessed both floppys at the same time (doing an XCopy)! The Issue was a loss of power over the powercord to the computer and after adding another input of power to the motherboard (using one of the existing molex) all problem was solved.

So try add more power to the motherboard though another input. Now I did this by soldering a female molex to the same place on the motherboard as the powercord eneter but you could probably do a less intrusive operation using the floppypower connector as you "input point".

[OldSkool]

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the tip. The board is overclocked (I checked the numbers on the board no scsi, 25 Mhz 040, 160 mhz ppc). It's overclocked to 33 mhz 040 and 200 mhz ppc.
I tried another memory module I had the same instability problems. The crashes are at random sometimes after boot sometimes after 15 minutes. My maximum is about 30 minutes stable.
It could be power because the overclocked CPU need more power. They don't get overheated I think (the PPC gets warm but not hot and the 040 has a big cooler and fan and stays cool).

[Lemmink]

With an 040 on the PPC is is an absolute must that you put extra power to the board via the floppypowerplug on the board. It is an absolute execption that an 040 PPC will run without that.
If you have an 060 PPC you don`t need that fix, as the 060 draws way less power then the 040

[Karlos]

Assuming you have sufficient power reaching the card, other things to check:

Can you try any other memory on the card?

How does the card behave if you switch the socket you install the existing memory in?

[kas1e]

Stability of bppc is pain I have too some strange problem, i do not have any crashes, etc (tons of time for setup), but some times ppc stuff lookup .. Best problem is 'lame_wos'. Halt on 4-10% after encoding . But other ppc stuff  work stable. Like frogger, picshow, some warp3d demos, games, etc. Two days ago, i was think that all ok with lame, i can encode full album without problem .. but today agayn 4-10% and halt I do not know .. maybe it is envs, maybe power, maybe sun not so big as must be

MAGIC OF VOODOO

[OldSkool]

I applied additional power via the floppepowerplug. Something magical happened. Yes yes yes it's stable!!!!!!!!!!!! Now running Doom (warpos) for more than a hour.

The extra power and BPPCfix program solved my problems.

Now the machine is waiting on the BVision card I bought via ebay.

Thanks Forum!!!

[Brian]

When you add the BVision you might actually need to add more power directly onto the BPPC card, else the BVision might not get enough power. Can add power to the card via the fan connector on the BPPC card (make a splitter so the fan can still draw it's power from there).

[OldSkool]

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the tips. Strange that phase 5 never put a direct power connector on their boards.

[LuisTHE]

 Can i add 12V power to the fan connector or just 5V?

[x56h34]

Do not ever try to add +12V to the fan connector. It means instant death for the BPPC card.

[LuisTHE]

  I´ve added 2 floppy connectors directly from the PSU to the motherboard,one where the floppy used to connect and other where the led lights used to be,is this ok?

[LuisTHE]

  Thanks for the advice!

[sian]

that  is the quiest death of an amiga i've ever seen, ect wjhen  my partner  upgraded my amiga lol  im kiddiding.
:hammer:

Hi you all,

I'm a beginner on the Amiga front. There are some stability problems with my recently bought BPPC. I have the following setup:

OS 3.9 (boing bag 1 and 2 installed)
BPPC 040 (cooler and fan) doesn't get hot
PC power supply 300 watt
1 memory module of 128 mb
internal 2,5" harddrive

In the bios I played with the memory setting a bit and found that:

70 ns: very unstable
60 ns: improved stability
free config: best stability (but not stable enough)

The system still freezes randomly. Any ideas or advice is helpfull.

I already tried the following:

Additional cooling PPC (including fan): no effect
Diskdrive power direct from power supply: no effect

[tone007]

You forgot to get in your time machine and go back 5 years to when this thread was active!  How embarassing!