Upgrading Blizzard PPC

hese

Well-known member
AmiBayer
Joined
Aug 24, 2008
Posts
1,685
Country
Finland
Region
Savo
Thought to post this tiny blog about upgrading Blizzard PPC cards.

Sometime ago I received a Blizzard PPC 68040@25 card for upgrade. The plan was to replace the 68040@25 with a faster 68060@50 processor.


The only hindrance was that the processor was soldered onto the board.


After a while the old processor was liberated.


Next the surface mount jumpers needed to be switched from 040 to 060. There is a handy drawing floating around in the Internet (by an unknown author) which describes the role of each jumper. The voltage selector (ferrite bead) needed to be swapped from 5V to 3.3V and the 68k selector (tiny resistor) from 040 to 060.


Now the board was ready for the 68060. A socket was soldered onto the board for easier CPU replacement and then the new 68060 processor was installed.


The final step was to upgrade the firmware. The card did boot okay with the old 040 firmware but the PPC part was not detected anymore. Flashing the card with 060 firmware fixed that.


With a relatively small amount of work the 68k part works now 3-4x faster. (y)
 
I like the low profile heatsink, where did you get that?
 
The cpu and the heatsink came along with the BPPC, I don't know where the customer got them from.
 
Back
Top Bottom