Review of Phase5's CyberStorm MKIII Accelerator
By Fabian Jimenez
Well, I finally did it! I broke down and bought a Phase 5 CyberStorm MKIII accelerator from National Amiga. I was darn lucky too, it was the last one Greg Scott had in stock! The CyberStorm MKIII features the Motorola 68060 cpu clocked at 50 mhz, 4 simm sockets, and an Ultra-Wide SCSI controller.
The CyberStorm MKIII came in an unmarked black box. Remembering the box I saw the CyberVision 64/3D in, this seems to be a common motif with Phase5. Inside was the card, a manual, installation software, and some spacers for Amiga 4000T installation. The manual was both in German and English, and had clearly pictured illustrations on how to install the card as well as terminate the onboard scsi controller. Unlike the 3640 040 card the CyberStorm is replacing, the 060 cpu did not require any heat sink or fan cooling device to be mounted to it. Impressive!
The first thing you are told to do is install the modified AmigaOS libraries from the provided floppy. After this is done, you can then power down your machine and begin to take it apart. Having a 4000 desktop, I had to remove the front face plate as well as the floppy drive bay assembly to gain access to the cpu portion of the 4000's motherboard. Removing the 3640 and placing the CyberStorm is was fairly easy, after checking one jumper on the motherboard. I placed two 16 meg simms into the first bank of simm sockets. The CyberStorm MKIII does require you to buy memory chips in pairs.
Pretty confident that everything had gone well up to now, I reassembled my 4000 and turned it on. The machine turned on and booted fairly quickly. Opening and closing windows on the Workbench were noticeably faster, as well as running common applications. I tested everything from Multiview, Final Writer, Ibrowse, Ppaint and ImageMaster. It was amazing to see how responsive the machine was. Most noticeable was the increased responsiveness from cpu intensive games like Doom, Descent, and the Quake Demo. Even my ShapeShifter worked without a hitch and seemed as speedy as a low end PowerMac.
Running unscientific speed tests, my 040 4000 jumped from 25 MIPS (Meaningless Information Provided by Salespeople) to a whopping 125 MIPS under the 060 cpu. Also the transfer rate on my 4000's IDE controller went from 1.7 megs/second to 2.7 megs/second after installing the card. I was able to run Miami TCP, Ibrowse, AmIRC, and play an mpeg-audio file at high quality with no significant drain on my 4000's multitasking.
My only complaint about the CyberStorm MKIII was the decision by Phase5 to install an Ultra-Wide SCSI controller. It may be a little bit of overkill to have 40 megs/second transfer rate for my Amiga. I know this was done since the MKIII is based on their PPC PowerUP design where such a controller would be more logical, but have you priced Ultra-Wide SCSI drives and cables? Maybe one day I will save up the $90 I will need to buy the cable, terminators, and adapters to use my older SCSI devices. I don't know when I will be able to afford those Ultra-Wide hard drives! The cheapest one I found was a 4 gig drive for $450.
In the end, if you can upgrade your Amiga to an 060 cpu I would highly recommend you get the CyberStorm MKIII from Phase 5. I have heard of problems people have had with other 060 accelerators especially the ones made by Apollo. The 060 gives your Amiga the power it needs to run some fairly cpu-intensive applications. Even if you don't render files in Lightwave, web browsing is 100% better with this cpu.