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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?

Back in 1997 the AmigaOS, Workbench, was not yet ported to the PPC so it had to run on the 68k chip. The idea of the time was to run CPU intensive tasks such as MP3 players and JPEG viewers on the PPC chip. While not really a “clean” solution at the time it seemed like a good idea until a native PPC port of the Workbench was released or until a fast 68k emulator was released so that 68k OS could run faster on the PPC side of the card.

A couple of problems appeared quite fast after the launch of the long awaited PPC cards for the Amiga though.

The PPC card was expensive, you could purchase a complete PC for the price of just one high end PPC card, many Amiga fans opted out lured into Quake and Windows95.

It was not really such a performance boost after all, while in theory it was kinda cool to have an 180 MHz CPU inside your Amiga, what good is it when the operating system and most applications still ran on the 68k side?

What where you supposed to do with it? Not many “killer apps” where released right after the launch of the PPC cards.

The success of the PPC on the Amiga was not that ground breaking but as time went more applications where released for the expensive turbo board. Finally in 2007 AmigaOS 4.0 was ported to the Phase 5 PPC cards so that a full PPC Amiga operating system could run on a classic Amiga.

Enough of the history lesson.

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You would think that a CPU chip as badass named as the “PPC” chip would be quite a bit larger than the 68k chip and require liquid nitrogen cooling. You where wrong, it actually smaller, but still require hefty cooling (optional though).

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The PPC chip is soldered straight onto the circuit board which means you can not upgrade the PPC CPU, although overclocking is relatively easy and have been proved giving great results with modest improvement of cooling.

The CyberStormPPC card has a unique custom heatsink that is specially made just for this card, it has a 5 volt fan from Sunon mounted stock. These fans have got a bad reputation of failing, and I can understand why. Sunon is a quality brand but these tiny fans running at 5 volt wears out fast and does not cool as good as a full 12 volt fan. Keep the heatsink but change the fan IMHO.

So today I removed the heatsink of off the PowerPC chip, removed old thermal paste and applied new while blowing off dust from the card.

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Nice card, dont you think?

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