I am wondering if one of you can help me with what I think may be a hardware issue in my A1200-T which uses the Blizzard 1240 68040@40MHz. The screen seems to corrupt after about 20 minutes, giving all manner of unusual patterns and flickering pixels. Not long after, the machine locks up.
The whole system seems to run very hot, especially the custom chips. I added heatsinks and extra cooling to the case but unfortunately the environment itself may be partly responsible, it's very hot and humid around here for most of the year. Hell will freeze before that situation changes
When you added the heatsink, did you use a bit of thermal grease? It's necessary to conduct the heat from the chip to the heatsink. No need for the "expensive" stuff like Arctic Silver, just the cheap stuff from RadioShack will work fine.
Also, if you want to know which chip(s) are shutting you down, you might want to play a bit with some freon spray, chilling one chip at a time until operation is restored. Might be a bit hard to get nowadays, it used to be much easier to find before we got holes in the ozone layer.
Finally, check the rotation on the CPU fan.. they work better if they are blowing air onto the heatsink instead of pulling air from it.
I have tried. I know the 68040 is the toastiest of the entire 680x0 series, especially at 40MHz.
There is still a problem with the display going bad, though it takes longer. Several of the motherboard chips seem to get very hot - so much it burns to touch them sometimes.
When you added the heatsink, did you use a bit of thermal grease? It's necessary to conduct the heat from the chip to the heatsink. No need for the "expensive" stuff like Arctic Silver, just the cheap stuff from RadioShack will work fine.
Also, if you want to know which chip(s) are shutting you down, you might want to play a bit with some freon spray, chilling one chip at a time until operation is restored. Might be a bit hard to get nowadays, it used to be much easier to find before we got holes in the ozone layer.
Finally, check the rotation on the CPU fan.. they work better if they are blowing air onto the heatsink instead of pulling air from it.
The heatsink is definately greased on with a bit of thermal transfer compound. The fan is blowing through the sink rather than drawing through it too.
Not seen any freon spray, but my blistered forefinger is not a bad indicator .
Freon spray. Hmmm, is it legal still? I can't imagine it would be too good for the environment.
first i had a blizzard 1240/40, with no cooler on it. it worked, but the system was slow and there were the gfx glitches. crashed often too (but sometimes i could use it for hours...).
now i have an another motherboard and a blizzard ppc with a 040/40 with no cooler (same stuff as before) and i've got the same gfx problems...
im sure its becouse of the heat. 040 not so rule:)
what type of cooler can be attached to a blizzard ppc? an old 486 cooler? or something newer?:)
The 040 gets wery hot,remember that from my a4000 with the ppc 233+040/40. Not sure why they did not put an cooler on it. As i took an cooler from the original 25mhz cpu daughterboard. And put the huge fan from the back of the tower on top. Helped a bit,atleast the cpu was now colder. If you can't find a cooler i can take a look if i can find mine for you.....
I have the CyberStorm 060 MK3 50MHz which runs quite cool. It doesn't have any active or inactive cooling system. It's actually the SCSI chip that has heat problems on this card.
Maybe a upgrade to 060 might be in order? Especially if your machine is being run in a warm room/place.