Sonnet Quaddoubler for amiga 4000

[aysel]

Hi all,

Just thought I would make a short post about this interesting little upgrade as theres very little available online for its use with Amiga's.

I have been hunting one for almost two years and then two cropped up in the same week so I grabbed them.

The Sonnet Quaddoubler is a small PCB about 2inch x 4inch which has a Motorola 68040 mounted on it. I always thought they were overclocked 40 mhz chips but the two I have are both full 040 50mhz chips with a slight overclock to 57mhz. After a bit more research this makes sense as the Quaddoubler used must be a multiple of the bus speed of the accelerator, the commodore A3640 is 25mhz so CPU must be 50mhz.

To install I just removed the 040 @25mhz from my Commodore A3640 accelerator and plugged this board in its place. If you are looking to use one with the Amiga then you just need to make sure you grab one which has the pin layout such that the Quaddoubler mounts parallel to the A3640, otherwise it wont fit back in the case!

The performance increase is fantastic for such a small outlay, Sysinfo now puts my machine at 37.7MIPS... up from 18.8! It doesn't resolve the motherboard RAM bottleneck the A4k suffers from but for my needs (games and demos) 37.7MIPS is an outrageous amount of CPU grunt

The A3640 removed from my A4k with the stock 040 25 still installed



With the Sonnet installed



Back inside the A4000... snug fit :D



And the obligatory Sysinfo shot... its gone from 4.7 MIPS with the original 030 @25mhz to 37.7MIPS with the Sonnets 040 @57mhz



I tested it by running Frontiers intro for three hours and its still super cool so overall very pleased. Amazing to think Sonnet never provided these or offered any support directly to the Amiga community and always promoted them solely as a MAC accelerator...

My Homepage - www.urbecks.com

 

[Unknown_K]

Newertech made those upgrades as well but I think you needed software to enable the external cache (on the models that had it) and that made a huge difference.

 

[RobertB]

That is excellent! I didn't know about the Sonnet.

You learn something every day,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://www.dickestel.com/fcug.htm

 

[Dave Farquhar]

Wow, can you get any closer to an ultimate Amiga than that?

 

[olePigeon]

I'm from the Mac side of things. I never new that Sonnet made an accelerator for Amiga. Or Newertech, for that matter. That's cool.

 

[Dave Farquhar]

I'm from the Mac side of things. I never new that Sonnet made an accelerator for Amiga. Or Newertech, for that matter. That's cool.

As best I can tell they didn't, but the parts just happened to work in Amigas so Amigans used them too. I dug up a few stories on Usenet about Amigans contacting Sonnet for help and not getting very far.

 

[aysel]

So with the four cards and the Quaddoubler it turns out things were getting a little toasty inside the case. The accelerator, CPU, Picasso II and GVP were all running nice and cool but the heat their respective heat sinks and fans were dispersing had nowhere to go.

Ventilation on the A4k is really poor, its basically a sealed unit and to make things worse the PSU fan blows into the case instead of externally!

So I picked up two high volume exhaust fans, the second is for the A3k and will fit straight into a card slot. For the A4k though, the heat is mainly generated by the 3640 Quaddoubler and PSU so putting it in one of the slots wouldn't work because the daughterboard basically segregates the case down the middle.

Instead I removed the expansion slot cover, removed the metal plate on the end of the fan, modified it so it sat flush to the back of the case, bolted it to the chassis though the expansion slot holes either side and then clipped the fan unit back into it so its held solid. Plugged in its exhaust vents perfectly through the expansion slot hole and my digital thermometer puts the case internal at room temperature after 2 hours of running a few 3D demos