What about the new Viper cpu cards?

[neongod]

I've seen some new turbocards at www.vesalia.de
Viper 040, 060...

Does anybody tried a card one of these? What about speed, stability? Does it fit well in a desktop A1200 case? How is the heating? is it fire hot?
What about memory speed, map rom function and support..?

Who is producing that card?

any information are welcome.

thanks,

neon

[Vincent]

you can get these cards from www.powerc.com aswell, they don't really say anything about them, but they are good boards (I've got an old 030/40) and they're a good price aswell.

[Quixote]

neongod noticed:

I've seen some new turbocards at www.vesalia.de Viper 040, 060...

...Does it fit well in a desktop A1200 case?

;-) The text on the site says that it fits in any Amiga 1200, and in the picture it looks to be the same shape as the accelerator in my brother's A1200 desktop, so I would go so far as to bet that it would.

Hey Neon,

  I downloaded the web page showing the Viper card and looked at the jpeg with an imaging program. The processor in the picture is the XC68040RC25M. Historically. the 040's always ran hot and need extra heatsinking.  A fan with a heatsink would be better. On an unmodified A1200, that would require leaving off the CPU door on the A1200 case - not a really good idea. The 060's didn't have the heating problem like the 040's because they ran at a lower voltage (3.3V). But because of the advertised speed (50MHz), if they are using a 50MHz 060 and not one of the faster ones (I believe Motorola makes a 75MHz version), then heating would still be a problem.

  Just for the record, I've got a 68030 accelerator that runs at 50MHz, which is it's rated speed and I feel it runs too hot. Probably very soon, I'm going to add a fan-cooled heatsink to it, somehow physically tied down the board to the motherboard, and leave off the CPU door entirely. This will mean elevating the whole A1200 off of the top of my computer desk permanently, but I already have it elevated anyway temporarily. Myself, I'm patiently waiting for a ColdFire accelerator board to come out.  :-D

[Brian]

Take a good look at the card again.. the CPU is pointing inwards to the computer... there should be no problem putting on the trapdoor with the card inserted from a formfaktor point of view... though I would at least cut some nice holes in it to get some cooling to the CPU. There is a good chance that there is actually room for a cooler and a fan on this card inside the A1200. But as you say I would probably chuse the 060 CPU instead as it runs much much cooler and the price/performance is much better.

As for you 030 running hot att 50Mhz that's normal... Those chips are made to fry eggs on I belive. My Blizzard1230 ran extremly hot but I still had the trapdoor closed and it never complained for all the years I've used it so there's probably nothing to worry about. :-D

[lorddef]

 

Brian wrote:
Take a good look at the card again.. the CPU is pointing inwards to the computer... there should be no problem putting on the trapdoor with the card inserted from a formfaktor point of view... though I would at least cut some nice holes in it to get some cooling to the CPU. There is a good chance that there is actually room for a cooler and a fan on this card inside the A1200. But as you say I would probably chuse the 060 CPU instead as it runs much much cooler and the price/performance is much better.

As for you 030 running hot att 50Mhz that's normal... Those chips are made to fry eggs on I belive. My Blizzard1230 ran extremly hot but I still had the trapdoor closed and it never complained for all the years I've used it so there's probably nothing to worry about. :-D

thats bizzare, my blizzard 030 is overclocked to 60mhz, and it stil runs really cool.

[lempkee]

interesting cards, sadly they doesnt have a PPC option , they should....as who would want a 68k only setup now if they paid as much as this?....

os4 is ppc...mos is ppc... that is enough explained i guess..

[Karlos]

@supertech,

I had a large heatsink/fan on my BlizzPPC's 040 whilst it was still in the desktop case. I had to stand the thing an inch off the table :-) But it worked fine...

Annoyingly, now it's in a tower, the 040 faces the side panel and there isn't room for the fan. It doesn't seem to run that hot though (recently got a very low profile fan but havent fitted it yet)...

[Calen]

My BPPC 040 is how it was when i got it, no heatsink or fan on the 040 CPU, just on the PPC CPU itself, the 040 does run alittle hot but not that bad as i have never had a problem with it over the years.
The higher clocked (33mhz and above) 040's i would recommend some kind of cooling for though.

Running at there limit, the 040's our indeed the hottest in the Amiga family of 68K CPU's

[Mad-Matt]

I have a BlizzPPC

For me signs of 040 overheating show up first in apps that make use of the fpu, such as quake or amigamp, flashing triangles or simply amigamp crashing or the slider moving wildly.

I use  pentium sink/fan in my power tower. theres probably only halve a milimeter between the fan and the tower case but its deffinatly working as without the fan the fpu overheats and i have problems.

I tried overclocking to 33mhz, but the fpu trouble was worse and also i got crc errors in files.

[Brian]

[olegil]

Heh, all these people talking about odd things happening reminds me of when I tried running the A1G3-SE on 750MHz :-)

Works nicely until you try to do any math. Mplayer would give me tons of pixel errors. However, it did crack a lot of RC5/OGR really really fast :-)

Of course, I'm using a VGA cooler which isn't really specced for overclocking like that.

I'm now happily back under 700MHz (666, with 133MHz bus) and I think I'll stay there...

The A1200 is up from 25 to 40, though. That's a measly 60%  :-D

[Graak]

Olegil:

Do you know any good place where you can get hold on 100 MHz crystals? I'm thinking about overclocking my Apollo 1240 40 MHz to 50 MHz :-)

[olegil]

It looks like noone makes 100MHz crystals in the usual hole-mounted cans like used on the A1240.

However, you're studying electronics, right?

Buy the 100MHz version of these:
http://www.elfa.se/pdf/74/07459001.pdf
and then download this pdf as well:
http://www.elfa.se/pdf/74/07455769.pdf

Now make a small circuit board with 4 pins which you can mount the ####er on.

Or maybe I should just fess up and admit I have a certain feeling about this project, so I might test it out myself first, then send you the resulting product :-)

Would be cool to have, I must admit. Might even be worth a bigger cooler to get from 60 to 100% overclocking :-)

I know the sonnettech 50MHz 68040 was really an overclocked 25MHz, but with one HELL of a cooler. So why not? Standard Athlon cooler should do the trick. Maybe best to add one of these, though:
http://www.elfa.se/elfa/produkter/no/2004248.htm

But at that price? Never :-)

[Graak]

Hmmmm, it's a complete crystal osciallator, that needs no external components?

I think I'm going buy one of these thingys just for the hell of it :-)