Thoughts on the cyberstorm Mk II and III

[redrumloa]

@BIG-IRON

Aaah I just emailed you, I see you already have the card and you only paid $100? That's one hell of a good bargain. I'd receomend you keep it and use it in that A3000 you are building up. Setting it up isn't very difficult. I used to use an MKII on an A3000 myself. I can help talk you through set up if needed. It can also likely be overclocked to 66Mhz easily.

[Brian]

At 100$ it's a real bargin, that is usually what the new 060 chip cost on their own. I've seen it go for less but only once in the last 3 years so.

The MK3 is the better card with UWSCSI controller on board but as said you need the INT2 fix for A3000 (done in a minute if you have a solder iron) and it could be a bit of a problem overclocking it (not that one should, 060 is plenty fast and something you want to nurse into a long and helthy life, not a 6 month speedfreak).

I too think you should keep it to you're own machine. It's not that common to see 060 boards for sale at a resonable price so you might hate yourself for selling it. If you however decide that selling is what you want to do then put it on ebay with a starting pricetag of 250$... as long as it works perfectly it will sell itself.

[Corrie]

TjLaZer wrote:
@Corrie:

And SCSI works fine too? I remember some reports that up to 65MHz it was fine but over that caused SCSI errors or something.  Well on the MKII most had a socket so it was way easy to overclock, just pop in a new 66MHz oscillator.  I also heard MKII's were able to go to 80MHz more often than any other accelerator ever made!!!

Yep, my SCSI has never had any problems with overclocking. I have run the whole board at 80mhz without any problems at all. I am quite positive I could have cracked the 100mhz mark except I didn't have any 100mhz oscillator. I have the latested e41j 060 cpu, which helps ;-)

I settled for 75Mhz as about 75mhz I had to drop the ram from 60ns to 70ns for it to boot without hanging at times. So a full 75Mhz 68060 is a good speed, so I am happy.

[Will-i-am]

I have two Phase 5 Cyberstorm PPC cards. Pretty freakin' fast, I must say, but so far the networking issues are #1 on my list of Amiga stuff to do. It's possible I would sell one, though, since what I'm doing (animation) doesn't really call for that kind of speed. I know they're both all maxed out with ram and such. Somebody make me an offer.....Anybody interested in two Intergraph machines with all the Microstation 5.0 software? Got a couple of those, fully functional dual procesor unix beasts with ethernet cards, big heavy crt monitors, digitising tablets, 15 button mice....I used to draft for surveyors but all the surveyors are doing their own thing with Autocad. Buggers. I'd like to have some liquidity oh yeah...8-)

[TjLaZer]

I was doing some benchmarking on my GVP-m 4060 T-Rexx and when run at 66MHz it outperformed the Phase 5 CSMKII @ 66MHz...  I highly recommend this GREAT card...  I wonder how it compares to the MKIII @ 66MHz?

[X-ray]

Dudes.....and dudesses:

I have a Cyberstorm Mk II in an original Amiga Technologies A4000T. Shortly after I got the board I also ordered the CyberSCSI add-on module, thinking that it would be faster than the existing 4091 board.
Well, I got a rude surprise: it is significantly slower!! I contacted the retailer and they did some checking up and told me that nowhere in the marketing of the CyberSCSI was it claimed that it would be faster than the 4091 board. I said well why did you sell me that when you knew I was installing it in an A4000T (they needed to find out whether I had the rev 11 Buster chip before purchasing the Mk II). They said 'we don't ask why you want it'.
So, I used the CyberSCSI to control slower devices like an external CD-Rom and an external Zip drive. At least it didn't clash with my 4091 board.
Now here's the interesting stuff: I got 4 70ns SIMMS for the MkII, which gave me 128mb on the MkII and I had two 8s on the motherboard. I got into raytracing and decided to overclock the MkII. I used a 60mHz crystal. Result: machine froze, crashed and generally behaved like a donkey on novacaine. Took a while to find the problem: CyberSCSI. Yep, you can't overclock a MkII and keep the SCSI module on it. As soon as I took the SCSI off, everything was cool. I tried a 66mHz crystal, but got crashes. Could be I need faster memory, but I was happy enough with 60mHz.

Keep that MkII.

[Framiga]

Yep, you can't overclock a MkII and keep the SCSI module on it. As soon as I took the SCSI off, everything was cool. I tried a 66mHz crystal, but got crashes. Could be I need faster memory, but I was happy enough with 60mHz.

this is a well-known problem.

CyberSCSI must be clocked with the original 50 Mhz crystal, otherwise, unstability and even not working CSMKII at all.

Ciao

EDIT- someone knows, where could i purchase, a 68060@66 Mhz?