System information

As part of the upgrade I bid on and won a pair of
32-Meg SIMMs. They went for $15.50 U.S. plus
postage, which added another $3.00 to their pur-
chase price. Small price to pay when you consid-
er that this will bring the RAM up to 64 Megs.
Besides installing the two eBay 32-Meg SIMMs,
the only change I made to the motherboard
before installing it was the addition of a small
aluminum heat-sink on top of the PowerPC
processor itself. I did this for several reasons:
firstly because it was easy to do, just setting the
sink on top of the flat chip and wiring it down,
and secondly because it was so cheap, just $6.96
Canadian over at Best Byte on Thickson Road at
Highway 2. I could have performed this entire
upgrade without installing more RAM and with-
out the heat-sink and the entire cost of the
upgrade would have been the $10.00 U.S. cost of
the board (plus $5.70 postage). The 24 Megs of 72-
pin RAM in the 580CD could have been trans-
ferred to the 5200CD board (which originally
shipped from Apple Computers with only 8
Megs installed !).
Throughout my experience with the many Mac
models and upgrades that I have presented in the
Double Click I have always relied on the Apple
Personal Diagnostics program to establish the
relative benefits of the processor upgrade cards
and accelerators I have installed and written
about. Much that happens in nano-seconds is just
too hard to accurately evaluate without a tool
specifically designed by Apple to compare
Apples to Apples, so to speak. Apple Personal
Diagnostics can compare performance and create
dated numerical records of past performance and
allow me to compare the same system before and
after modifications.
As you can see from the Apple Personal
Diagnostics pictures included in this article,
before swapping out the motherboard the 33 Mhz
68LC040 580CD compared unfavourably with the
33 Mhz 68040 Quadra 950, scoring overall a pal-
try 31 compared to the Quadra’s score of 87.
These “overall” scores are an assigned product-
derived from factoring a bunch of processor val-
ues relative to the original Mac Plus, which has
Before
After !