Article 65353 of comp.sys.sun.admin: Path: matra.meer.net!goonsquad.spies.com!genmagic!bug.rahul.net!a2i!infoseek.com!uunet!in2.uu.net!imagen!rpal.rockwell.com!news.Stanford.EDU!pln From: pln@egret0.Stanford.EDU (Patrick L. Nolan) Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin,comp.unix.admin Subject: Re: Cycle 5 Upgrade VS Sun Upgrade Followup-To: comp.sys.sun.admin,comp.unix.admin Date: 2 Oct 1995 20:06:21 GMT Organization: Stanford University Lines: 38 Message-ID: <44pgnt$blu@nntp.Stanford.EDU> References: Reply-To: pln@egret0.Stanford.EDU NNTP-Posting-Host: egret1.stanford.edu X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL0] Xref: matra.meer.net comp.sys.sun.admin:65353 comp.unix.admin:40198 Jason Herring-Mechanical Engineer (jherring@lcmeter.com) wrote: : The Cycle 5 board is not manufactured by the Concorde Group; they are just : a reseller of the board. They are a premium reseller, which usually translates : into better pricing to end users due to volumes shipped. : I have two of these boards in use with no compaints. The installed very : painlessly, and are quite fast. A great upgrade path for older SPARCstations. : I also have experiance with the Weitek PowerUP chip, which has lackluster : performance by comparison. I will be buying more of these Cycle 5 motherboards : over the next year or so. I have 4 of them. Three are in Sparc 1+ boxes, and the other in an IPC. The IPC board is apparently a new product. Generally I agree with the comments above. They work as advertised, and there's a big performance boost. Here are some random notes: There's a set of dip switches that allows you to select the memory access speed. You might have to play with this to find the best setting. They memory can be either 30-pin (like the 1+ or IPC) or 72-pin. The 30-pin SIMMS must be installed in banks of 8. The 1+ board can handle 16 30-pin SIMMs, just like the original, but the IPC board can only hold 8. All three of the 1+ boards came with little fans that started to screech after a few days/weeks. All have been replaced, two twice. They say that has been fixed by improved fan bearings. When one of these upgrades is done, the kernel architecture changes from sun4c to sun4m. That makes it necessary to re-install the operating system. These boards have a parallel port. To make room, the two serial ports are combined on one connector.