Quadra 610

[Mithrandir]

So i have decided on a quadra 610 for my summer project. I have already bought one online, but it will take about a week to get here. I bought it thinking that yay it has a full 68040 processor. Now after reading a little more about it, I find out that sure enough, there was a version of the quadra that had only the 68LC040, the quadra 610 8/160. I don't have anything of the computer except a screenshot from the front and a screenshot of the about this mac page showing its total ram. So I am guessing I will just have to wait until it gets here to see which processor it has. How worried should I be that this one might be a 8/160 (I did buy it from North America...) and is the difference in speeds really that bad? Thanks in advance for putting up with my Macintosh bewilderment at this time.

 

[Cory5412]

If your frames of reference are "G3s and higher" and "The Mac SE" -- I wouldn't worry about performance very much at all. If it ends up really being awful, then you can upgrade it later, get a better machine, or whatever. The ram is probably the first thing I'd upgrade though, given a few extra dollars, mainly because most people think that it's important to be able to run a bunch of applications at once, even on a midrange desktop from the early '90s when that just wasn't common.

 

[Gorgonops]

Unless you're running software which specifically wants a math coprocessor and/or you plan on running alternative operating systems (A/UX, NetBSD, etc) 68LC040 vs "full" 68040 hardly matters at all. If you bought the thing just to fiddle with old Mac games on I wouldn't obsess over it. For integer tasks (which is most game and productivity software) the two CPUs will execute code at exactly the same speed.

(The aforementioned "alternative operating systems" require a "full" '040 because there is a hardware flaw with most LC CPUs that prevents FPU emulation software which depends on inline trapping of the unsupported instructions from working entirely. This doesn't affect most MacOS programs because the math functions which would use FPU are routed through a higher-level library in the first place. There probably is a small category of ill-behaved MacOS programs that contain inline FPU instructions but I can't name any offhand.)

 

[uniserver]

good info on the 040 fpu less,

 

[Mithrandir]

Ok my worries are gone now.