I got one of the 2010 batch cards from a fellow a.org member and wanted to share my experiences.

CPU: the card came with a rev1 EC 060(WTF!!!). But, it works fine using FPU and MMU so I guess no harm... There is no heatsink, but the chip really doesn't need one. I have mine running at 66.67mhz with just an indirect fan and its cool to the touch.

RAM: This card is REALLY, REALLY picky about simms. Mine came with softhut simms and still has issues. I have about 15 different pairs of 32mb simms, only about 50% will work. Doesn't seem to matter EDO vs FPM vs ECC, etc... Even with the softhut simms, the card WILL NOT work with 4 simms and burst mode. With 4 simms and noburst, I can run the board/cpu at 72mhz. With 2 simms and burst the max is 66.67mhz. With 2 simms and 60ns timings the max is 64mhz. Burst increases the memory bandwith almost double - so this is what I run.

SCSI: Damn fast! I get a tad over 9mb/sec. I did have to use expertprep to set the drive as "synchronous". The scsi has a "bug"... the initialization timeout is some sort of cpu loop. At 63mhz all works fine. At 64mhz I have to set my boot drive (a 60x cf card on a scsi bridge) to scsi id 2. At 66.67mhz I have to set the scsi id to 5 or higher. this becomes an even bigger problem with cdrom drives. They require longer to init, so the best I got was 63mhz at scsi id 6. Needless to say, I am using my cdrom on the a4000 ide channel.

Bus Speed: I am overclocking my a4000 motherboard to 33.00 mhhz and the gvp works fine. I was able to run at 35mhz on a different a4000 motherboard.


Anyone have any other experiences?