Did I Get a Bum Daystar Card?

#1 Tue, 25 May 2010 - 04:24 68kMLA

I try and figure things out by myself first, but since I am new at this I am running into a lot of new situations. I recently installed a Daystar Powercache card (P33 designation) in my IIci and downloaded and installed the control panel from Daystar, but I do not notice any performance difference. Is there a good way to check this out and see whether it is doing anything for my machine?

Best,

John

#2 Tue, 25 May 2010 - 05:07 68kMLA

Look for the control panel and make sure it is turned on.

On the 040 cards you see a 040 icon when booting, I don't have an 030 to see what it does.

#3 Tue, 25 May 2010 - 07:48 68kMLA

There is a Daystar Icon that pops up during windows load, so I guess it's there. Boot time was 44 seconds instead of 56, but I was guessing that boot time is primarily an issue of hard drive speed. My benchmarking methods without a formal benchmarker right now are kinda crude: I just time certain functions, such as boot to termination of stopwatch, open a Word document, open PageMaker, general feel of performance in games like Syndicate. Didn't seem much different, is all, so I was confused as I would have figured that with a 50MHz clock speed 1992 to 1994-era software under 7.1 would be pretty snappy.

Then again, this card doesn't have the FPU so maybe there is a big difference there.

Best,

John

#4 Tue, 25 May 2010 - 07:58 68kMLA

FPU does nothing for boot times.

All CPU upgrades do is speed up calcs, I have a IIci with a Daystar 68040 running at 48Mhz with a heat sink and fan. Speeds up apps , but cache would make it even faster.

#5 Tue, 25 May 2010 - 15:09 68kMLA

Yeah, that's what I 've come to an awareness of--that the things that I was wanting faster were functions of hard drive seek and access time, not CPU speed. Cool.

Best,

John

#6 Tue, 25 May 2010 - 20:29 68kMLA

Get a faster HD and maybe a UWscsi HD controller. FWB Nubus Jackhammers are fast and bootable, 68 pin 10K RPM SCSI drives are super cheap these days.

#7 Tue, 25 May 2010 - 21:11 68kMLA

Get a faster HD and maybe a UWscsi HD controller. FWB Nubus Jackhammers are fast and bootable, 68 pin 10K RPM SCSI drives are super cheap these days.

[Nitpick]There is no UWSCSI HD controller for NuBus. The FWB JackHammer was *Fast* and Wide SCSI, which has a theoretical maximum speed of 20 MB/s and is much slower in practice. You'll be lucky to get actual sustained transfers of 12 MB/s and 6 MB/s seems more common.[/Nitpick]

#8 Tue, 25 May 2010 - 23:54 68kMLA

OK, you got me. But a Jackhammer is still much faster then the built in SCSI setup.