Vintage Amiga Hardware Blog

I messed around my Phase 5 CyberStormPPC card today. The card holds a 68040 clocked at 25 MHz and a 604+ PPC clocked at 180 MHz.

The CyberStormPPC card is really the pinnacle of classic Amiga performance technology. You get a card capable of running a 060 CPU and you get a powerful co-processor (the PPC chip) capable of doing things much faster than the 68k CPU ever could. So why not ditch the 68k chip then?

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Today I picked up a used Amiga 4000 desktop packed with some goodies such as CyberStorm PPC 040, 180 MHz PPC, SunRize AD516 16-bit soundcard and a couple of other bits.

The A4000D is one of my favourite Amiga computers because of its relatively small size, expansion potential and good looks, they where also very popular, at least here in Sweden..

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I have decided to clean up my Amiga 4000 internally. It is a busy system under the hood with cables all over the place hindering air flow and makes my Amiga run hotter than it should do.

I am running a BMon monitor switch (originally made by Eyetech) inside so that I can switch manually between CyberGraphX and AGA screens. The BMon switch clutters up the inside of the case a lot so let us hope Individual Computers will release an automatic monitor switch to go with their Indivision A4000 in the future.

To begin this mission of cleaning up the inside of the Amiga 4000 the first decision was to remove the DVD-rom. I am sharing files from a server these days where I have many Amiga ISO files which I can mount over the network so a DVD/CD is not necessary anymore IMHO.

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You have probably heard about SCSI-terminators, well this is an IDE-terminator for an Amiga 4000.

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There is an easy solution to increase the volume of air that can pass through the Amiga 4000 by removing the closely spaced fins at the back of the PSU and replacing them with some perforated steel of aluminium. If one want to it is also possible to replace one of the connectors and increase the space for air to flow through more.

I have not been able to find a large sheet of thin perforated steel or aluminium so I could not open up the Amiga PSU as much as I wanted to at the backside.

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Finding a replacement cooler for the CyberStormPPC card can be difficult because most PC north/south-bridge replacement heatsinks typically expects four holes evenly apart in the edges of a 4 cm square. You can be creative and drill and tap a heatsink so it fits the CyberStormPPC card or mount a small Zalman heatsink which have very flexible hardware for mounting the heatsink.

IMHO the stock heatsink is actually fine, it is very thin but should do its job perfect when mated to a proper fan instead of the half centimetre tall 40 mm fan that comes as stock. (more…)