Daystar IIsi/SE/30 Adapter, $150 on Ebay!!?

[TylerEss]

I was getting hangs during INIT loading with the IIfx SIMM; they'd go away if I'd take out half my control panels then put them back in over the course of a few reboots. Eventually I'd get it running on full extensions, IIfx SIMM, and Turbo040, but it took a lot of reboots to get there.

I'm guessing that the 4.11 ROM is more compatible with the ROM-swapped SE/30 than 4.01.

I don't think I've ever had any software that's crashed on the Turbo040 except for the VM kernels for MachTen (and those are noted in the Turbo040 readme as being incompatible).

Oh, well, I learned that the gestalt doesn't change with the ROM swap, which is what I wanted to know. :-D

With the IIfx ROM SIMM I don't get any funny types of patterns at cold boot, horizontal lines or otherwise. Just a longer time before the screen clears and the happy Mac shows up.

Also, since I had my SE/30 open to change the ROM SIMM, I took a few photos to document my setup. You can pull them up at http://www.fenestrated.net/~macman/se30_turbo040/ and see what the 'frame slice' modification actually looks like!

You can also see the modifications I made to my Turbo040 when overclocking it to 48MHz. The crystal oscillator has been socketed and the 20MHz unit replaced with a 24MHz one. I added a blower to the factory heatsink, which gets rid of the crashing problem. I affixed the heatsink to the 68040 using the old overclocker's 'super glue and arctic silver' method, removing the frag tape DayStar had used. I also put some little heatsinks on the ASIC and cache SRAM just for fun; they probably don't help much but they can't hurt, right?

 

[trag]

Hmmm. Does the floppy drive work properly with the IIfx or IIsi ROM and *no* Daystar upgrade? How about PowerCache vs. Turbo040?

JDW, I remember that earlier thread. But it wasn't a topic in which I had a great deal of interest at the time. I think I was focused on my IIfx RAM project then.

 

[trag]

Also, since I had my SE/30 open to change the ROM SIMM, I took a few photos to document my setup. You can pull them up at http://www.fenestrated.net/~macman/se30_turbo040/ and see what the 'frame slice' modification actually looks like!

Nice pics. It is fun to see other folks' rigs.

You can also see the modifications I made to my Turbo040 when overclocking it to 48MHz. The crystal oscillator has been socketed and the 20MHz unit replaced with a 24MHz one. I added a blower to the factory heatsink, which gets rid of the crashing problem. I affixed the heatsink to the 68040 using the old overclocker's 'super glue and arctic silver' method, removing the frag tape DayStar had used. I also put some little heatsinks on the ASIC and cache SRAM just for fun; they probably don't help much but they can't hurt, right?

Can you elaborate on how you added the blower to the heat sink? Or did you remove the factory heat sink and then reattach the whole assembly including the blower?

Nice overclocking job. Any time I get a Turbo040, after I test it, the first thing I do is add an oscillator socket. They are just too overclockable not to. Especially if you get something like a 25 MHz model.

 

[TylerEss]

In short, the blower is just glued onto the side of the heatsink; I glued it after the heatsink was glued to the 68040, but there's no reason it couldn't have been done the other way around.

This setup has evolved over time; here's the story of the cooling solutions my Turbo040 has used...

Originally I mounted a normal fan on the end of the card stack to blow over the stock heatsink. This was highly inefficient because most of the fan was blocked; eventually that fan died. The SE/30 ran most of the time but would occasionally hang.

Next, I removed the stock heatsink from the 68040 and mounted a GeForce 4xx GPU HSF assembly with frag tape. This was also loud and quite inefficient but it was from a really cheap graphics card; the "heatsink" was crimped together in places and had really poor thermal conductivity. Sometimes the SE/30 would crash when it was hot outside. Also, the height of the HSF was slightly more than the stock heatsink, causing even more severe fitment problems in the card stack.

To improve upon this I put the stock heatsink back on and then carefully glued the blower to the side of the stock heatsink. The blower is the CPU fan from a dead white iBook, by the way. This worked OK but I noticed that the chip itself was *way* hotter than the heatsink. That was when I decided to try the "super glue in the corners, arctic silver everywhere else" trick which seems to have worked. When you touch the chip and heatsink, they feel like about the same temperature.

I wish there were enough room to just stick a Pentium III or IV heatsink on it and just call it done, but alas that's just not what it's like being inside an SE/30.

 

[JDW]

I was getting hangs during INIT loading with the IIfx SIMM; they'd go away if I'd take out half my control panels then put them back in over the course of a few reboots. Eventually I'd get it running on full extensions, IIfx SIMM, and Turbo040, but it took a lot of reboots to get there.

Since you mention multiple reboots, I just don't know that it is a software incompatibility in your case. I would be very curious to see if you get that same result with a 40MHz or lower clock speed. Because again, my stock 40MHz card doesn't exhibit those hands during boot, perhaps because I have not overclocked the card.

So we either need to underclock Tyler's card to test this. Or we need Equill and a few others to try a high speed (40MHz preferably) Turbo 040 to see their results in the SE/30.

Does the floppy drive work properly with the IIfx or IIsi ROM and *no* Daystar upgrade? How about PowerCache vs. Turbo040?

The 1.4MB floppies read/write PROPERLY when the Daystar Turbo 040 is removed, even though a IIfx or IIsi ROM is left in the SE/30. However, since I am using the TS Adapter, I must also mention that removal of the Turbo 040 also requires removal of the TS Adapter. You cannot simply use the TS adapter's top slot to insert a MacCon Ethernet card. You must use it for an accelerator. In other words, the middle slot is mandatory on the TS Adapter, while the top slot is optional.

So simply saying that "it works fine" without the Turbo 040 does not in any way indicate if the problem is the Daystar card or if the problem is the TS Adapter -- since both are being removed.

PowerCache? I wouldn't know. I tried one 50MHz Daystar 030 card which also had 50MHz 68881 co-processor. But as you can see in my Sad Mac photos, I only had crashes with it. I ultimately had to return it to the seller. I think the reason it didn't work in my SE/30 is because it was not the UNIVERSAL version of the 030 card.

What I can say is that the DiiMO 50MHz 030 (with co-processor) works fine with any ROM. No issues with the floppy drive. However, I do not use the TS Adapter along with the DiiMO because the DiiMO doesn't require an adapter like Daystar cards do. But again, this does not necessarily say the TS Adapter is at fault. It still could very well be a Daystar ROM incompatibility with the floppy drive system of the SE/30.