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Radius Rocket Upgrade.txt
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1992-08-28
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Date: Tue, 11 Feb 92 17:41:44 PST
From: bear@tony.ucsb.edu (Cedric Bhihe)
Subject: post this please
[ Moderator : please post this message in the hardware forum folder under
heading Radius-Rocket-in-Mac-II.txtS. Thank you ]
For those of you who expressed interest in the Radius Rocket upgrade path for
the Mac II line, I use a Radius Rocket Nubus accelerator with a pre-release of
the software v1.3 they call the RadiusWare. Here is what I can share on that
subject/product.
-o-
If you are thinking about upgrading your Mac II, IIx or IIcx, you have several
options, not just the Rocket, depending on your priorities:
a) you can go quadra 700 only if you possess a IIcx, that will give you speeds
greater than those offered by the Rocket, but not so much greater that it
should be your only concern (in fact those concerned with speed should either
go the Next route, or for those spending somebody elseUs money, the Silicon
route. The quadra offers the advantage of full hardware compatibilty which
the Rocket does not. It is also more expensive that a Rocket which goes for
$1,550 before tax these days. But I donUt know much about the QuadraUs so ..
b) you can now buy the Tokamak or the ImpulseTechnology (404/889-8294 in GA)
68040 products.
I donUt know anything about the latter. The Tokamak, according to the
manufacturer, is better designed for similar speed improvement. Both are
designed for maximum acceleration in CAD and heavy math computation type
situations. The Tokamak is about $500 more expensive than the 68040 Rocket.
Its advantage is that it stays within Apple's requirements concerning power
consumption.
I use my Rocket for Mathematica symbolic calculations with an abundance of
parameters. So far, using Mathematica 2.0.3, I did see a roughly 4 to 6 fold
improvement with 7.6 Mb of DRAM on the Rocket compared with 8 Mb on my mother
board before the upgrade.
Now that I have 20 Mb on the Rocket card, I will port my Fortran computing
>From the main frame I use to my Mac II+Rocket. Only then will I know whether
it is the 'Titan' that Radius claims it is. I expect to be disappointed
naturally. But the point is it will perform the computing in a *reasonable*i
amount of time.
I will discuss the specifics of the Rocket below, be patient.
c) Last, you can buy the IIfx upgrade, but I would recommend against it for
at least two reasons : First, the reason Apple did not make the IIfx an
integral part of its line of Quadra is that IIfx machines use costly techno-
logy. Apple obviously decided to abandon that commercial avenue. If you happen
to have a friend who use a IIfx and who has bought SIMMS for it, you know what
I mean. Therefore the IIfx is a dead-end in terms of product-line. Second,
buying the upgrade, now priced at about $1700 + the above mentionned SIMMS is
A LOT MORE expensive than buying a Rocket.
Third, the rocket is faster according to ads and various independent reports
in the published litterature. I have not checked that myself.
Period and in memoriam for the IIfx. Amen.
-o-
Now comes details on the Rocket :
*price*: I shopped a lot and found $1,550+shipping+tax to be the best price
in the country. That was in December 1991.
*retailer knowledge*: good in only one instance, which was Third Wavew
Computing. But they ask more money than the price I paid for it. Otherwise
retailers know VERY LITTLE about the Rocket. In fact it seems they donUt give
a hood about it.
*Radius support*: I am proud to have contributed to make it a little better.
I must have spent at least 90 min of cumulated long distance phone time with
either their sales representatives in TX and CA or their tech support in CA.
Sales people are nice and apologetic when they donUt know the answer to a not-
so-tech question, like details of the product specs for instance. Tech people
(that's where it gets irksome) are not so nice and apologetic when THEY don't
know either. They always find out though and get back to you in time.
By the way tech-support does not have a toll free number at Radius.That is a
serious drawback since retailer knowledge is so abysmal. Feel free to complain
loudly about that. I did for my part.
*Tech tips about the Rocket* or *almost-all-you-will-not-find-in-their-
litterature-and-they-will-not-tell-you-before-you-receive-the-Rocket-in-the-
mail * :
1) The Radius Rocket can be returned during the first 30 days after you
received it. This holds until Radius changes its policy, NO MATTER what the
retailer tells you. Of course the retailer may assess a restocking fee. That
is perfectly legal. But the fact is most of them say they will not offer a 30
day MBG. Well they ought to since Radius offers it to THEM. Go shop somewhere
else if necessary.
2) if you plan to put the Rocket in your Mac II :
- Make sure you get revision 1.3 of the Radius software.
- Make sure you leave 2 Mb of RAM on your Mac II mother board. It is
indispensable for booting your Mac before the Rocket takes over and
actually reboots it ith its own memory. After rebooting the amount of
that memory the Rocket actually uses is puny and devoted to I/O only.
But it's got to be there.
- Make sure you have rev B of the Mac II ROM. If not Apple Inc offers a
free upgrade path for your mac II (yes ! free from Apple !!) in the form
of an entire logic board swap. Go to your nearest Apple dealer. They are
to do it free for you. I did it. You can do it !
3) The Rocket needs at least 4 Mb of RAM. Preferably 80 ns but that is not an
absolute requirement. It works fastest with all four of it's DRAM slots filled
with memory of the same size and speed but will work too if this is not the
case.
4) It will not take 16 Mb SIMMS because (itUs unbeleivable but true) they take
too much room. Feel free to complain about that. It will take any 4 Mb SIMMS
though, the special type for the Mac II and IIx (i.e. the one with the ninth
PAL chip) and the regular (eight chip) ones. Buy the latter ones they are
cheaper. That is one thing that only the Product support *manager* at Radius
knew about. The rest of the tech rep did not.... One of them even tried to
play dumb. It took him 35 min of conversation for him to admit he did not
know. We finally got that last point right.
5) The rocket actually can make your Mac II, IIx, IIcx 32 bit clean. that is
if you choose to do so. It comes with Mode 32 (Radius +Connectix=license
agreement) and you also need the memory Cdev by Apple to be set on 32 bit.
6) The Rocket will cause very few trouble otherwise. It does have some
printing problems on a HP Deskwriter but to Radius credit it might simply be
because I have a pre-release version of their software. It is Syst 7 comp.
It is not compatible with the excellent Mac AppleZoom but will of course work
nicely with Radius monitors. If somebody knows how to fix MAZ for it to work
with the Rocket I woul be more than interested in learning. In fact it
provides significant g24x video acceleration. Call Radius about it. It is not
compatible with Dovefax and many other fax/modem packages. I beleive the
problem is soft. So the solution for your particular compatibility problem
is probably on the way.
7) It will eat up about 600Kbytes of DRAM just like that at booting time.
You will not be able to access that full 8Mb of memory you saved up for years
to buy later on. It needs the memory in order to upload the content of the Mac
II mother board ROMs and keep them in memory. This I believe has at least two
purposes : i) to make access to low level (ROM) calls faster, ii) to be able
to actually substitute faster software routines for the hard coded ones in the
ROMS. Anyway, just live with it, it works. However if you like to run Syst 7 +
Mathematica 2.0.3 + Kermit in the background all the time like I do, 7.4Mb
will not be enough. You will need to spend another $500 on four 4Mb SIMMS to
get a total of ??? ... ..... .... .... 19.4Mb!! Those of you who did not get
that answer right, read this paragraph all over again ! (just joking).
The radius Rocket is a good product. I recommend it to those of you who cannot
afford a Quadra. It does take too much power but I personnaly live with that
quite well. That's all.
Cedric Bhihe
bear@voodoo.ucsb.edu
Materials Dpt
UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA