Upgrading a IIcx...

A very helpful gentleman here in AZ fixed up my ancient IIcx for me, so it is now capable of booting up and being used. Has a blueSCSI in there, 20MB of RAM, fresh caps, and is overall cleaned up.

What I'd like to know is, what upgrade options were for this machine? What sorts of Nubus boards or video cards are still available that could boost this thing's capabilities?

Thank you much.

Accelerated video and an Ethernet card would probably be the most accessible. I was personally able to get an E-Machines Futura SX and an Asante Ethernet card for very little, a few months ago. There are accelerators with adapters for the CPU socket (if present), and of course Radius Rocket cards, but all of those are going to be expensive and rare. Luckily there's also the socket Booster, but being primarily intended for the IIx and SE/30, its physical footprint interferes with the floppy/HDD carrier in the IIcx.

Boctor said:

Accelerated video and an Ethernet card would probably be the most accessible. I was personally able to get an E-Machines Futura SX and an Asante Ethernet card for very little, a few months ago. There are accelerators with adapters for the CPU socket (if present), and of course Radius Rocket cards, but all of those are going to be expensive and rare. Luckily there's also the socket Booster, but being primarily intended for the IIx and SE/30, its physical footprint interferes with the floppy/HDD carrier in the IIcx.

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Okay, thank you. That was a thorough answer! Gotta copy that down...

'Preciate it.

In order to use a Daystar accelerator in the IIcx you had to first install the Daystar CPU socket adapter. Interestingly, I have found that when these "IIcx Daystar Accelerators" do come up on eBay, they tend to sell for less than you would think. I was able to score both the adapter and the accelerator for around $100 maybe 2 or 3 years ago.

Perhaps people don't realize that the CPU adapter is a separate component from the CPU card, and so they think that the accelerator will only work in the IIcx? I feel like I remember that in the days before accelerator clones were common, a 50mhz 030 daystar cards (P33?) went for a lot on ebay just by themselves because they were generally advertised for use specifically in the SE/30, even though I believe they will also work in the IIcx and IIci.

Additionally, I was able to get my hands on a Radius PrecisionColor 24XP at the VCF swap meet in NJ for next to nothing. It certainly makes a big difference with the 2D graphics. I put a Rominator II and BlueSCSI in, and although the slow bus speed on the IIcx is the biggest inhibiting factor on that model, it is definitely much faster now than it was stock.

With the high prices that IIci's are fetching these days on eBay, the IIcx is a nice alternative.

Boctor said:

Accelerated video and an Ethernet card would probably be the most accessible. I was personally able to get an E-Machines Futura SX and an Asante Ethernet card for very little, a few months ago. There are accelerators with adapters for the CPU socket (if present), and of course Radius Rocket cards, but all of those are going to be expensive and rare. Luckily there's also the socket Booster, but being primarily intended for the IIx and SE/30, its physical footprint interferes with the floppy/HDD carrier in the IIcx.

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Good call! Not all IIcx's had socketed CPU, and if my memory serves me correct, not all had a ROM slot either?

I think they all had the ROM slot, but you're right on the CPU socket part... only the early models came with a socketed CPU from the factory.
If you wanted to install an accelerator through a CPU socket adapter and had a later model you would have to send the logicboard in to the manufacturer of the accelerator to get the CPU desoldered and a socket put in place.

I've got IIcx adapters for Daystar accelerators available just in case someone would want one.

Yeah... not sure my IIcx’s CPU’s upgradable. I think I do have a ROM slot though. I would like to upgrade as much as possible -- once I land a job, however.

So... My main options are ethernet and video upgrades (that man who repaired my machine gave me an ethernet board he wasn’t using, so now I guess my only options are the video and RAM (currently 20MB) to upgrade).

32MiB of RAM is more than enough to satisfy whatever you can think of using on this machine and still has plenty left over. You'd be hard pressed to find a program that can push 8MiB of RAM that doesn't drag the whole machine to a crawl. Internet Explorer 4 is one AFAIK. More than that and you're looking at long boot times (my IIci has 64 and has like a 20ish second boot delay) and you can't really use it.

Honestly the first reply is really solid. Ethernet needs no mention, and while unaccelerated video isn't bad, the difference between an accelerated video card and one that isn't is slightly noticeable, but not enough to impact day to day use. Finding one that is accelerated is the hard bit. You probably won't need more than 640x480 either: the operating system wasn't really designed to need it and the type of stuff you can do with it on say, 1024x768 will hurt too much to make it worth using.

Mk.558 said:

32MiB of RAM is more than enough to satisfy whatever you can think of using on this machine and still has plenty left over. You'd be hard pressed to find a program that can push 8MiB of RAM that doesn't drag the whole machine to a crawl. Internet Explorer 4 is one AFAIK. More than that and you're looking at long boot times (my IIci has 64 and has like a 20ish second boot delay) and you can't really use it.

Honestly the first reply is really solid. Ethernet needs no mention, and while unaccelerated video isn't bad, the difference between an accelerated video card and one that isn't is slightly noticeable, but not enough to impact day to day use. Finding one that is accelerated is the hard bit. You probably won't need more than 640x480 either: the operating system wasn't really designed to need it and the type of stuff you can do with it on say, 1024x768 will hurt too much to make it worth using.

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Hmm... More RAM is not necessarily better? The OS and an app like AOL (I have a lot of old e-mails saved) take up almost all of the system’s memory. I can’t imagine that pushing the RAM much higher wouldn’t be anything but a boost to the system. I want to run Infini-D, Photoshop and Illustrator, and possibly others.

Is 32-bit addressing turned on? If not, the OS can't use more than 8MB of RAM and the rest will appear to be used by the OS.