Re: Cirtech GS 8 plusRAM woes...

["ict@ccess" <gids.rs@sasktel.net>]

On Apr 5, 10:47 am, amotyka <anthony.mot...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi guys,
> I have recently come into posession of a Cirtech GS 8 plusRAM board,
> having given up on ever receiving the Sirius ram card I ordered a year
> ago... Cirtech was a British company, which is probably why I can't
> find much info about it on the net, only photo's, no manuals, and I
> believe this was the first 8mb board available for the iigs. The
> trouble is, ever since installing it I have been plagued by random
> crashes. Replacing the card with my old 4mb AE GS-RAM III makes the
> system (almost) impossible to crash. I have read old posts about 8mb
> cards causing trouble with DMA and rom 3 machines, but I'm using a rom
> 1 and the cards installed are reactive micro's Microdrive (not the
> turbo version so no DMA), the apple scsi card (not the high-speed
> version so again no DMA) with cd drive attached, uthernet card (no DMA
> to my knowledge) and a Transwarp clocked at 16mhz. The card checks out
> fine with mega memory tester.
>
> I'm going to run some more tests e.g. with the transwarp at a lower
> clock and reducing the ram on the board, but would be interested to
> hear if anyone else has encountered similar problems with 8mb boards,
> or if anyone can give me some more info on this particular card. I
> read elsewhere that this card also has a rom disk feature, and in fact
> has two rows of header pins which I presume would be used to program
> it.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Anthony

I have a Sirius 8 mb card and I was getting quite a few crashes as
well.  I did the power supply mod in which you change the 18 guage
wires to 12 guage.  This helped quite a bit and cut my crashes down to
1 a day.  I would liked to have done one more mod.  The ground trace
is supposedly not heavy enough since it goes all the way to the
opposite side of the board where the RAM slot is.  A ground wire could
be soldered at the power connector and go to the ground terminal of
the RAM slot.  I was lazy and ok with 1 crash per day, so I didn't
test this one out.   But I would recommend trying a larger power
supply you can get from www.reactivemicro.com and also do the ground
wire to RAM slot mod.
I use a ZIPGS rated at 12.5 Mhz in slot 3, ramfactor in slot 5 and
CFFA in slot 7.

Rob