68040 upgrade cards in IIci — #20

Post #20 by Quadraman

Source Forum	68kMLA
Category	68k
Post Date	Sun, 4 May 2008 - 05:02
Original URL	https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/68040-upgrade-cards-in-iici.12949/

Post

I have something to mention about the difference between the Mobius and DayStar 40MHz 68040 accelerator card benchmark results... it looks to me like the 'CPU' and 'Maths' scores are being inflated on the Mobius card by software that causes 'software-mode' SANE calculations to be performed on the FPU anyway (and at 80-bit instead of 96-bit precision).
DayStar calls this feature 'PowerMath' and when you enable the trancendental functions 'Enhanced PowerMath.' Check to make sure that feature is turned on on your DayStar results.

Click to expand...

Well, scratch that idea!

In my SE/30 with 48MHz Turbo040, with Enhanced PowerMath I get the following results: 39.8 CPU, 9.33 FPU (Norton System Info 3.5.3). With Enhanced PowerMath turned off, I get the same results.

You can really see how important memory bandwidth is to some of the tests that they're using, though. With the 128k cache turned off, my scores dropped to 30.1 CPU, 8.1 FPU. Obviously a lot of their tests fit wholly into 128k L2 cache but not into the (32k? I don't remember exactly) L1 cache.

Re: IIci with OS 8... You're totally right about the IIci loving System 6... That said, mine seems to like running OS 8.1 from time to time; it's like going window-shopping and it's glad to get back to System 6 when it can. Since it's used for testing, it's napping 99% of the time anyway.

Also, 68030 Macs run MacOS 8 just fine; the biggest problem is making sure to have enough RAM. http://home.earthlink.net/~gamba2/os8_68030.html

Even if you can use hacks to make it run, would you really want to on an 030? The IIci and IIfx would be the only machines you could realistically consider running MacOS 8 on. Anything running a 20mhz or slower CPU must crawl. There's usually a reason why Apple discontinues support for certain models and it's usually because the user experience would be degraded by upgrading to the newest OS.