Some questions after upgrading Blizzard 2040 with 68060 CPU

[rodney37]

Hello all,

Yesterday I upgraded my Blizzard 2040 with a 68060 CPU, according to this very detailed web page by GMB:

http://www.g-mb.de/P5Rework.html


I used a Motorola XC68060RC50C 71E41J CPU(from Ebay), a 50Mhz oscillator from amigakit, a LT1085CM3.3 voltage regulator en 3 1N4001 SMD diodes, moved the power jumper wire and resistor underneath the CPU, removed R1, etc.

It's all clearly explained on the page. I did it carefully and also cleaned off all the flux leaving a neat result.

After doing everything carefully, I put the Blizzard back into my A2000 with R6.2 mainboard, powered it up, everything works fine so I am very happy. I did notice that at powering up you can now breefly see some flashing colours on the TV output

After doing all this there are a few things not yet clear to me:

- the CPU which I read somewhere is a 'mask 6' or 'revision 6' 68060 - 71E41J, gets a bit on the hot side after a few minutes. I would estimate that it's over 50 degrees centigrade, just barely can hold my finger on it for a few seconds but it's on the uncomfortably hot side. As I understood it from what I read before, this CPU is supposed to run nearly cold at 50Mhz? I should say that I have only tested the temperature without the top cover on. So airflow is not at it's best inside the case.

I checked the board's traces and found that the oscillator is powered from the voltage converter's output at 3.3V so I am sure that the resulting output clock signal is also at 3.3V, same as the CPU's supply voltage. Everything seems in order.

- running ShowConfig (OS3.1) gives the result:
PROCESSOR:      CPU 68040/68040fpu

I also tried sysinfo V3.24 which also says it's a 68040 CPU in the right area of the resulting screen. Performance measures 2.04 times compared to the performance of a A4000 68040 25Mhz. So basically it looks like a 68040 at 50Mhz performance-wise.

I am wondering, do I need to upgrade the firmware?
I already tried booting without any RAM plugged into the Blizzard (which is mentioned elsewhere on this forum), which might initialize some ICs as I read, but afterwards I got the same results.

I did install the Blizzard software through the installer but that was before converting the Board to fit the 68060 CPU.

Does anyone have some idea about my results?

Also, I would appreciate some tips about how to get the most performance from the Blizzard by installing the right software libraries and such.

Sorry about all my questions but some things have me a bit puzzled and I couldn't find any clear info on this until now. Perhaps other users could also benefit from any info posted here.

Thanks in advance for any advice :-D

kind regards,

Rodney

[Piru]

@rodney37

- running ShowConfig (OS3.1) gives the result:
PROCESSOR: CPU 68040/68040fpu

I also tried sysinfo V3.24 which also says it's a 68040 CPU in the right area of the resulting screen.

Neither ShowConfig nor sysinfo knows 68060 so using those is useless. Use a program that actually knows about 68060, such as WhichAmiga (WhichAmiga can be a bit unstable however, so beware).

Performance measures 2.04 times compared to the performance of a A4000 68040 25Mhz. So basically it looks like a 68040 at 50Mhz performance-wise.

sysinfo is really poor app for benchmarking 68060. Use something better such as SysSpeed.

[stefcep2]

You need to use the proper phase 5 68060 libraries (aminet)if you already haven't installed them.  Also for the fpu to work properly you need to have blizkick in your wbstartup drawer, plus there other third party maths libraries like hsmathlib which give a bit more speed.  There may be newer 68060 patches but thats how I remember doing things for my  A4000 cyberstorm mark 2.  The rainbow of colors you get on on reset and boot are normal and is phase 5's way of announcing to you that you now have the fastest 68k amiga you can get. 68060 is anywhere between 2 and 4 times as quick as 40 mhz 68040

[rodney37]

@Piru
Thanks for the information. From the SysSpeed results it shows that it is a 68060 CPU. So it seems that everything works correctly after all. I am very happy about this! :-D

Now I am only wondering about the temperature issue and how to install the right software to get the best performance from the 68060 in OS3.1

[rodney37]

@stefcep2

Thanks a lot for your info, that's very useful.:-)

At the moment, even after already doing the install from a Blizzard install disk there is no blizkick in my wbstartup drawer. I will check out the things you mentioned.
 

[adolescent]

@rodney37

Not sure how much of the cold 060 is just legend.  

But, was the CPU from China?  It's possible that it's an older mask that has been re-marked.  CPU060 and whichamiga will tell you the revision to be sure.

[Damion]

adolescent wrote:
@rodney37

Not sure how much of the cold 060 is just legend.  

But, was the CPU from China?  It's possible that it's an older mask that has been re-marked.  CPU060 and whichamiga will tell you the revision to be sure.

Yeah, I was wondering the same, as I've almost pulled the trigger on one of those "Chinese" 060's for my Tekmagic. It would be interesting to see if whichamiga reports a Rev. 6. I know that mine runs relatively cool at 80Mhz (always under 40C with a small heatsink and small amount of airflow, in a desktop case facing upwards), whereas the Rev. 1 is nearly too hot to touch at 50MHz. I can't easily remove the heatsink from my Rev. 6 or I'd do a quick temp comparison with both revisions at 50MHz.

[stefcep2]

rodney37 wrote:
@stefcep2

Thanks a lot for your info, that's very useful.:-)

At the moment, even after already doing the install from a Blizzard install disk there is no blizkick in my wbstartup drawer. I will check out the things you mentioned.
 

Sorry blizkick is also useful as it moves your kickstart rom into fast ram, but what you want is cyberpatcher in wbstartup to get the fpu to work at full speed.  this is in the 68060 archive here: http://aminet.net/biz/p5.

btw how hard was it desolder all of the 68040 pins and then resolder the 68060 pins without damaging the board or cpu?

[rkauer]

 Even without running WichAmiga, I can tell you have a fake rev.6 CPU:

 The E41J mark is a MC680RC060-50, not a XC unit!

[Damion]

Possibly he has a 1E41J with an "XC" prefix, "XC" 71E41J would seem to be a fake. :/ Hopefully the former is the case, that would also explain the warm operation, though it should still run cooler than the Rev. 1.

[stefcep2]

Either way why not just a stick a fan on it to be sure?

[rodney37]

@stefcep2

Thanks for the explanation, I see about blizkick. I suppose this will speed up everything since the Blizzard's memory is much faster. I will have a try with this. Sounds like a great idea.

I did see cyberpatcher as part of the Blizzard installation package. I will put it in the wbstartup drawer.

About the CPU, my board had it socketed as it's the Amiga 2000 Blizzard 2040 board. Desoldering a CPU would not have posed a great problem if I had to do it. At least, I would have risked it if it was needed. Desoldering is all about the right tools and technique. Otherwise the risk is too great to try it without those. Of course, if it's not necessary at all, that's always better. There is a lot of heat involved in desoldering such a big IC, at least there would be if you want to do it as carefully as possible to have the least risk of damage to the solder pads.
 
I did desolder all the IC's and sockets on my A2000 mainboard and put precision IC sockets in, and also I replaced all the electrolytic capacitors(since these can sometimes degrade over time) and even added some more. I also had to repair a poorly desoldered IC where the repair technician had damaged some traces during some old repair. It took me about a week to do all this.

[rodney37]

@adolescent
Yes, the CPU was indeed from China...
Now I am a little bit suspicious about this  :-)
I will definately try CPU060 to make sure.
I already tried to use whichamiga but it crashed and froze up so I cannot get any result from that.

[rodney37]

@rkauer

That's very strange because it does say:
XC68060RC50C

on the right of this:
71E41J
QEGM9830A
MALAYSIA

and sideways there is this code:
S23328-002

I hope I have not been sold a fake one but now I am not so sure...

[rodney37]

I just ran cpu060 and MyCpu060, they both said:

System: 68060MC Revision 6