Subject: REVIEW: Cyberstorm 68040 accelerator for the A4000
From: [email-masked] (Rene Laederach)
Date: 23 May 1995 20:00:11 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

PRODUCT NAME

	Cyberstorm 68040 accelerator for the A4000

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

	This the much-praised 68040/68060 accelerator which of course every
A4000 user would like to possess... :)

	It is a modular design where you can change the CPU board, the memory
module and the already available SCSI module which directly plugs into the
Cyberstorm carrier board.

	A CPU cache module which directly plugs into the CPU module will
allow you to raise the speed of this awesome beast even more.

AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION

	Name:		phase5 Digital Products
	Address:	Homburger Landstrasse 412
			60433 Frankfurt/Main
			GERMANY

	Telephone:	+49-(0)69-5488130
	FAX:		+49-(0)69-5481845

	They speak English, but they prefer German. I have not tested their
French knowledge.

I bought this piece at:

	PROMIGOS Bern
	Herrengasse 6
	3000 Bern
	SWITZERLAND

	Telephone: +41-(0)31-3123775

	Adrian Etter speaks German, French and English.

LIST PRICE

	Somewhere around 1700 Deutschmark - I bought mine for 1795 CHF
(Swiss Francs), but that included everything except the RAM - even the beer
at the computer shop which we needed after hacking it into my A3000.

SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

	HARDWARE

		You need an Amiga with a FAST slot like the A3000, A3000T,
		A4000 or A4000T. With A3000's and A3000T's, there is a
		chance this beast won't run. Also, with A3000's, you need
		some room as the memory module goes into the third dimension
		and the CPU board won't fit below the drive bay. I don't
		know how it fits into an A3000T, but it works in the A4000
		and A4000T flawlessly.

		Also, Kickstart in ROM is required. I recommend 3.1, but any
		A4000 3.0 will do the job. For A3000 owners, only the
		Commodore-made 2.04 ROMS and the Village Tronic 3.1 ROMs
		work. Other ROMs have been proven not to work.

		Also, on my machine, the Retina Z3 is a no-no. Any other
		Zorro II board or even a EGS Spectrum will work in the Zorro
		III mode, but my Retina didn't. I will sell it anyway - I
		need the Cybervision 64 graphics card.  :-)

		Also, some PS/2 SIMMs (the same you use in a A4000 or -
		hence the name - in an IBM PS/2). They have 72 pins, not 30.
		Access speeds of 70 ns or less are recommended by the
		manufacturer.

		A stronger PSU doesn't do anything bad, because most
		Cyberstorm buyers will have an excessively well equipped
		machine.

	SOFTWARE
	
		68040.library - found on every decent 3.1 Install disk
		if you need the latest version.

		CPU command to activate the copyback mode on the 68040.

COPY PROTECTION

	Actually a dongle with a CPU and a RAM module beside the carrier
board. :)   A bit expensive to copy. :)

MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

	Amiga 3000/25, 16 MB Fast RAM (on Cyberstorm), 2 MB Chip RAM.
	Board rev 9.3, Buster rev. 11, DMAC rev 02, Ramsey rev 04
	1 internal 1660K floppy
	Quantum Empire 1080 MB hard drive
	Archive Viper 525 MB tape drive (external)
	Toshiba XM-3601 CD-ROM drive
	No-name monitor 17"
	AmigaDOS 3.1, Kickstart 40.68 and WB 40.42

	All the above is in a tower casing from CompZ

INSTALLATION

	Installing an accelerator into an A3000 is nothing for the squeamish
and non-hardware-expert Amiga owner. No soldering required, but in an A3000,
you'll need some experience at hacking hardware.

	In the A3000 desktop model, there's not enough room to install the
Cyberstorm into it. You need a tower casing for it, preferably the one from
CompZ. I have not tested it with the Micronik and Eagle towers. I'd like a
report from people hacking a Cyberstorm into one of the latter tower casings.

A NEED FOR SPEED

	Many people know me from my witty postings, on FIDO as well as
Usenet and my little flame war against the fans of CDWrite. I have not
tested that piece on the Cyberstorm, but I suspect it would run if my Amiga
wouldn't blow up because of sheer shame. :)

	But you did not know my deepest secret - I still used a A3000/25
until yesterday! 12 MB FAST RAM were not bad, but my machine didn't like 16
MB ZIP RAM and then my bank account allowed me to buy something really cool.
I was looking around for an accelerator which would allow me to use common
PS/2 72-pin SIMM modules, and I had two choices - the Warpengine didn't fit
into my budget plans and then why did I need a SCSI so badly? I have the one
on my motherboard and it works with everything thrown at it.

THE INSTALLATION

	And then, I felt my machine could take a little afterburner as well.
Seeing the Cyberstorm at my dealer's and asked him if it would work in an
A3000. I knew there was a fair chance it would as many people have written in
fidonet.AMIHARD.GER and also in the AmigaNet. Yesterday, I called a good
friend and asked him if he could drive my tower to the shop. He did that and
we arrived there at the beginning of the afternoon. The dealer was busy
because he had to hurry with an A2000 repair and installation, but later in
the afternoon, he called me to come and help him a bit. And I went to him
again on my poor feet, and starting to hack my tower. One of the
modifications included the use of a hack saw to saw a bit off the metal
board holding my Zorro daughterboard to make the memory module fit. Removing
all the ZIPs from my A3000 because I did not want slow mem on my machine, we
placed the two SIMMs on the mem module and changed the jumpers according to
the manual. Then came the great moment - we put the Cyberstorm with the CPU
and the memory module into my A3000 and then the dealer reached for the
on/off switch and turned on my Amiga. Behold...zooooommmm ratatatatatatata
(my hard disk), a few flickers from the CD-ROM and the tape streamer and the
piece booted. Then he let me work on my machine... comments like "feels a
bit faster" up to "damn m0therf***er" when I tried to use the Copyback mode
where heard in the shop. Then my dealer got a few bottles of beer from
friend and we yelled "cheers" and finished off the beer really quickly. :)

AT HOME - INSTALLING, 2nd PART

	I would have continued at my dealer's wouldn't he have to close his
shop at 18.30. So he called a taxi to carry home my tower with the
cyberstorm in it. At home, I reseated the cyberstorm as my A3000 does not
have clips to fix the carrier board in place like on A4000s. Then off I
went, plugged everything in and rebooted my Amiga. It worked. Renamed my
WbStartupold to Wbstartup and rebooted. A funny requester came up telling me
there was no Retina hardware in my A3000. Then I went into Sysinfo and
checked for installed boards. There were none. I removed my Retina (while
the machine was turned off), and rebooted the system - voila, it found my
Multiface serial card again. Then I left the Retina outside my Amiga and
continued. This loss will only speed up the planned purchase of a
Cybervision 64. My dealer already has one designated for me. :)

	After this little incident and re-hacking my user-startup, I booted
my Amiga.  Golly, this takes about 30 secs now, whereas it took 48 before.
:) Not bad. Then I made a TeX test using PasTeX and the 1.4BETA6 68020
executable of bigvirtex.  The doc took 2:22 minutes to compile on my A3000/25
and only 36 secs on my Cyberstorm equipped Amiga. And converting faxes with
GPFax is so much faster now. And UMS is really fast. Just a beauty to
behold. :)

	Then I went into Sysinfo for a speed test. Here's the result:

Speed test

SysInfo V3.22 by Nic Wilson
---------------------------

CopyBack Mode................................ ON 
Instruction Cache............................ ON 
Instruction Burst............................ ON 
Data Cache................................... ON 
Data Burst................................... ON 
Central Processing Unit Type................. 68040  (IN USE)   
Memory Management Unit Type.................. 68040  (IN USE)    (IN USE)   
Floating Point Unit Type.....................  USE)   
Vector Base Register (VBR) Address........... $083393D4
Ramsey Chip Revision (A3000)................. N/A
Gary Chip Revision (A3000)................... N/A
DMA/Gfx Chip................................. ECS AGNUS - 2Meg 
Display Mode................................. PAL:HighRes
Display Chip................................. ECS DENISE      
VBlank Frequency in Hz....................... 50
Power Supply Frequency in Hz................. 50
Horizontal Frequency in KHz.................. 15.60
Card Slot Installed.......................... NO 
Hardware Clock installed..................... CLOCK FOUND
EClockFrequency in Hz........................ 709379

SPEED COMPARISONS AGAINST KNOWN MODELS & PERIPHERALS
A500 512k or A600 with 1MB CHIP ONLY.........  54.72
B2000, A2000, A1000 or A500 with fast ram....  41.41
A1200/14 68EC020 ICACHE 2MB CHIP ONLY........  23.78
A2500/14 A2620 68020 card....................  14.08
A3000/25 68030 ICACHE IBURST DCACHE NODBURST.   6.25
A4000/25 68040 ICACHE DCACHE COPYBACK........   1.58
CPU Million Instructions per Second..........  30.21
FPU Million Floating Operations per Second...   7.66
Speed of Chip Memory vs A600 Chip Memory.....   5.68
Dhrystones per second........................ 28950
Nics Comment................................. Numero Uno
CPU speed in MHz............................. 43.50

	The CPU clocking of 43.50 MHz is wrong, but I don't know exactly
why. I know for sure mine is clocked at 40 MHz, and this is fast.

	The SCSI of the A3000 gets also a small speed-up - my Quantum Empire
made 3.016 MB/sec and now about 3.256 MB/sec.

COMPATIBILITY

	 Most software that works on the A3000 under 2.04 will work on the
cyberstorm. This includes TeX, GoldED, csh as well as many others. One found
to make troubles is Massign retrieved from a Fish disk.

	As noted earlier, the Retina Z3 does not work in my machine. Probably
because Macrosystems hacked it to make it work on A3000/A4000's with a Buster
rev greater than 11. Because of this probable non-adherence to the Zorro
standard, I'll sell my Retina Z3.

QUALITY

	The build is of good quality. Mostly everything except the two ROM
sockets on the carrier board is SMD. There is also a bunch of jumpers on the
carrier board, but I did not need to change them.

EXPANDABILITY

	This was also an important point to make me choose the Cyberstorm. You
can attach a SCSI module as well as a I/O module (not available yet), which
encloses SCSI (actually, both the SCSI and the I/O module use the same logic
as the Fastlane Z3 SCSI), a high-speed serial port and a ethernet port.
A3000 users will need an adapter board to make them fit into their A3000,
they fit OK on the A4000.

	There will be a CPU second-level cache module available, which
directly plugs into the CPU module.

	The 68040 CPU module can be exchanged against a 68060 module if you
have enough money and absolutely need 90 MIPS, then go for it. But I'm at
least now happy with my 31 MIPS.

	phase5 also plans to make an A3000 carrier board so this piece will
fit into the A3000.

DOCUMENTATION

	It comes with a printed manual in German. It's IMHO quite well
written and does its job. I suspect there's an English manual too. My
dislike is that they should have used drawings instead of dithered
photographs. But that is the price if you don't use Amiga DTP programs -
they used QuarkXPress on a Mac, hopefully on an Emplant or an Amax Mac
emulator. :)

	Else the manual is well written.

LIKES

	Speed. Modularity. Memory module uses common 72-pin SIMMs.

DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS

	Incompatibility with my Retina Z3.

	phase5 digital products does not include a nice sticker which shows
that a Cyberstorm accelerator is in the Amiga.

COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS

	I've seen the GForce040 in action on my dealer's A4000, but it was
too expensive for me at the time. Speed was about the same.

	I have not tested the WarpEngine, but it has a SCSI on-board, but
cannot be expanded like the Cyberstorm.

BUGS

	Incompatibility with my Retina Z3, but no issue for me as I will sell
the card very soon.

VENDOR SUPPORT

	phase5 digital products offers a support, as well as my vendor does.
He's an expert at fitting Cyberstorms, he has done at least 30
installations. I should ask him next time I go to his shop. That's probably
when I'll buy the Cybervision.

	I have not contacted phase5 for support after the purchase, but
before the purchase, I asked them if a Cyberstorm would run in an A3000.
Their simple answer: "Maybe."

	The folks at phase5 are very friendly, and I've heard at least one
person has a perfect English.

	I'm not associated with phase5 in any way except as satisfied
customer of one and soon two of their products.

WARRANTY

	In Germany (I live in Switzerland), support and repairs are done by
phase5 itself. Here in Switzerland, the dealer (in my case, PROMIGOS) does
the support.

	My dealer gives one year warranty. I don't know if it only applies to
the original purchaser.

CONCLUSIONS

	This card is cool. Cyber Storm Rising. :) And so fast, modular and
uses relatively cheap SIMMs. It transforms your Amiga into a PC clown killer.
:)

	If I have to rate this product, I would go from 5, and deduct 0.1 for
the badly dithered images in the manual. If 1 is "no meat" and 5 "Totally
Doggy!", I would rate it 4.9. That is, almost totally Doggy!

	This card is simply cool!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

	This review is Copyright 1995 by Rene Laederach and freely
distributable as long as you don't use it commercially, that is, print it in
a commercial magazine. If you want to print it in whole or in parts, just
ask for my written permission.

You can reach me at:

[email-masked]
C-B.maus (Mausnet)
2:301/723.4@fidonet
39:110/312@amiganet
44:8010/312@aminet (Swiss Aminet only)

Rene Laederach
FIDO: 2:301/723.4                 | Expanding an Amiga is plug and play
Internet: [email-masked] | Expanding a PC is plug and /pray/

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