I got several responses to my previous post, so here is more info on the
NewLife 25MHz w/68882 closeout special:
I got the board from Mac Upgrade Specialists. It was a special during the
first week in August. It was in the MacWeek of that week, but I got a flyer
at their booth at the Expo in Boston. I don't have the address or number right
now but I can mail it to you when I get home.
Now the "secret" for installing it:
There was no way to fit the board in my SE. It just would not fit. Luckily,
my friend who was installing it for me had a newer SE that he used before he
got his IIsi this past spring. So I got that SE from his house and the next day
we swapped the internal frame, which holds the drives, from his computer to
mine. The DIP SIMM SE's have a pass through slot for the PDS, which gave us
just enough room to get the logic board with the accelerator board in place. It
is, however, very tight. I am not sure about long term heat build-up effects of
this. If you have an DIP SIMM SE, roughly 1988 1/2 or newer, you should be all
set. My SE was built in '87.
As far as performance goes, I just ran Speedometer 3.1 on the IIsi I am typing
on now and compared it with the results of the test I ran on my SE this morining
and the SE exceeds the IIsi in almost every catagory. My hard drive at home is
deathly slow, so that skews the average, but performance rating of my SE is
4.89 compared to 4.53 for the IIsi. The benchmark averages are even more
impressive. SE to IIsi is 9.27 to 5.83. FPU averages are identical at 1.26.
For the performance and benchmarks, a Classic is a 1.0. for the FPU, a Mac II
is a 1.0. So you see there is a drastic improvment. Like I said in the post,
the video speed is incredible. This is because the accelerator uses RAM in the
logic board for video and uses the RAM on the accelerator as normal ram. I have
my 4 Meg (4 1 Meg simms) in the accelerator and 1 meg( 4 256K simms) on the
logic board. The logic board RAM that is left over is used as a RAM disk. It's
crash-proof (you can restart/shutdown->restart) and it save the contents of the
RAM disk. If you shut off the computer, you lose the contents of the RAM disk.
The accelerator is incompatible with one type of SIMM brand, so of course I
had 2 SIMMs from that brand. I was able to swap memory with my friend though,
so I came out OK. The board requires 110ns or faster memory. I have 70ns. My
logic board RAM is 150ns.
If you have the right Mac, it will take under 1/2 an hour to install the accelerator. It basically just plugs in. You need low-height simms on the logic
board and it would help if you had low ones on top as well, since it is so tight. Otherwise, its a good board. Oh, yeah, the sound is bad now, but I can just
