> >IMHO, a Quadra 800 is about the 'ultimate' for NetBSD/mac68k.  It's the
> >fastest box the OS runs on and it is built from the get-go as a server.
>
> I thought the Q840AV was the fastest... am I wrong? (Hmm... is there
> someway to take advantage of that DSP chip?)
> http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_quadra/stats/mac_quadra_840av.html

I agree that the least painful and most powerful (in terms of common
hardware) would be the Quadra 650 / 800. They're only different in casing
(and a wire on the connector that goes to the LED on the Q800).

But yes, the Q840AV is the fastest Quadra made. Most of them, provided you
have good memory, can be overclocked to 50 MHz. The SCSI is closer to real
DMA than the SCSI on any other model. The memory bus is faster, too.

There are some examples of code which takes advantage of the DSPs (under
MacOS) to do simple jobs like calculating math for fractals. If someone
writes a generic interface to the memory space of the DSPs, I suppose it
wouldn't be too hard to set up and execute code on them. It'd be
interesting, to say the least.

On the other hand, every Quadra 650 / 800 I've ever used runs perfectly
when overclocked to 40 MHz. At the moment, I use three for IP NAT for
cable modems, and not only have I been impressed with their throughput
(500k/sec, at least), but they are extremely stable.

At 40 MHz and with the non-broken SCSI code, they're pretty fast, too;
they're fast enough to handle several ssh logins, DNS, email, and static
Apache serving.

But if you really want the fastest, find a Q840AV. The only m68k faster
would be a 68060.

John Klos