Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

s I start this article I am dreading
being able to finish it. I'm not
worried about going over the top
in terms of copy. I am worried about being
able to fill the page with pertinent information.
The main reason for my worry is that
the Sonnet Doubler is so simple it defies
belief. Simple in its operation and simple
to install
It arrives in a small cardboard box which
also contains a tool that looks a bit like a
small comb for removing the 68040 chip
from your 3640 daughterboard, an earthing
strap, a sheet of instructions and the
doubler itself. The instructions give you
guidelines on removing your existing
68040, covering all the different setups like
the epoxied heatsink, the clip-on heat sink,
and the paper-clip type spring clip heat
sink. Once you have tremulously
removed the heart of your
machine and pried the living
soul from it, you can then insert
the Sonnet Doubler.
II consists of a board roughly
twice the width of one 68040 socket.
with pins on its underside at one
end to insert into your now empty
68040 socket, and the new 68040 at the
other end of the board sitting under a
combination heatsink and fan. There Only
appears to be one chip on the board, other
than the '040 of course, along with a
sou* of resistors.
OVER-CLOCKED
Motorola only make 68040s clocked up
to 40IVHz as tar as I know, so the heatsink
and fan have to work even harder to cope
with an over-clocked CPU. The fact that it
is running hotter than the normal '040
seems to make little difference and cer-
tainty didn't cause our machine to crash
any more than normal.
Owners of machines other than A4000s
may have trouble fitting the Doubler owing
to the increased height requirements -
stands about an inch and a half proud of
the daughterboard. You might be able to fit
it into a 3000T but, unless they are willing
to make senous modifications to the case.
A3000 owners will probably be out of luck.
What speed does it run at? Well.
Sysinfo, that notoriously unreliable benchmark,
gives us a rating of about
38.13MIPS and 9.66MF1.,.OPS. Running it
EIF a dee doe dah
d
Too warped
to fit?
I asked Bhttersoft whether the Sonnet
Doubler would work on any other
68040 accelerator card but it seems
that most other accelerators don't use
the 68040 at 25MHz, they all overclock
to 28MHz. This means the
Doubler will unfortunately not work as
it actually relies on there being a
25MHz clock rate.
through AIBB gives us results of around
twice the speed of our standard 040
rating. But is E399 too much to pay for
doubting the speed of your Amiga? It's
certainly on the edge of acceptability as
far as I'm concerned when you could have
a machine that is at least four times the
Nearly all PC motherboards these days come with what is known as a ZIF socket
for the CPU to sit in. ZIF is an acronym for Zero insertion Force and works by
having a socket with overwide holes in it for the CPU's pins to go into. There is
a lever on the side of the socket which, once you have inserted your Pentium or
whatever, you pull over until it locks once more
This basically locks the pins of the CPU in contact with a conductive layer
inside the socket. No more fiddling about trying to pry a chip out of its socket,
levering it this way and that with a small screwdriver, hoping you won't bend
any pins - just flip the lever back and the chip will just lift out.
As to why there aren't any ZIF sockets on Amiga motherboards or accelerators.
I can only surmise that this Is because the 6800 range of processors isn't
so swiftly obsolete (either that or the sockets cost too much).
HA R D W A R E
ublps4,L15i n
11
1125 a 1t 1111P poem until he dimougrpd
Amiga Computing
OCTOBER 1995
thi5 affelerator
speed for about a grand. Admittedly, that
is over twice the amount the Doubler
costs, but you would also have your original
3640 board to sell, and they fetch
somewhere between E300 and E450 for
the nght buyer.
That brings the cost of the CyberStorrn
down to between E550 and E700, a much
better proposition, especially when you
consider that you will get better memory
access and an optional SCSI-2 controller.
Of course, it you can't afford that extra
dash then the Doubler does represent a
good way of increasing the speed of your
machine for relatively little outlay.
slam ESSEDII1115
RED -- Essential SLACK = Recommended
1
—
'
••••
the bottom line
Product: Sonnet Doubler
Supplier: Blittersoft
Tel: 01908 261466
Price: E•399
Ease of use 9
Implementation
Value for money
Overall
9
7
9
29