By Wilfred
10/06/99
Hardware
One
Introduction
Here you have it, my overclocking
report using the latest Afterburner
2.0 for the 3Com's Palm III, IIIx and V
PDAs! All was well and good as I embarked on testing the
stability and gains from overclocking my beloved Palm.
Though the Palm
IIIx and Palm V both use a newer Motorola DragonBall EZ
MC68EZ328 processor than my Palm III, the 3 machines are all clocked at 16Mhz.
Thanks to my
close pals who owned the IIIx and V, I was able to do simple
comparisons and benchmarks on their models relative to my
older Palm III. It was apparent that switching and
loading apps on the IIIx and V was faster. Well, that was until
I found Afterburner. =) I was
able to attain very significant performance improvements.
If you are a
IIIx and V user, the improvements are even more phenomenal. You
will see in the benchmarks later.
Jean
Paul Gavini has since updated Afterburner from version 1.0
to version 2.0. The primary difference is that in version
2.0, Afterburner became a hack instead of a standalone
app, relying on Hackmaster to do its magic. Also, v2.0 is able to revert back to 'Normal' clock speeds when doing
hotsync. This is indeed a plus point.
I had been using
Afterburner version 1.0 and had since upgraded to version 2.0.
I'd never encountered any problems when I used them on my Palm III. Same could
be said of the IIIx and V.
Overclocking
successes varied from model to model, processor to processor.
I received a couple of mails from friends and readers to say
they didn't quite achieve the same speeds I attained, which
led me to conclude that silicon yield did play a part.
We have read
Barry's trouble of getting Afterburner to work on his Palm. It
led to his Palm crashing, requiring a hard reset and a
recovery of data via Backup Buddy. This should be a relatively
isolated case. After the initial scare, the file has been put
back up at PilotGearHQ
and most user reviews had been positive.
Brief Run-down
of Test Machines:
-
Palm III,
Palm IIIx, Palm V
-
RAM: 2Mb,
4Mb, 2Mb respectively
-
Flash Pro
TRG installed on ALL machines
-
OS 3.02,
3.1, 3.1 respectively
-
Batteries:
Alkaline, Alkaline, Lithium Ion.
Some notes about
this write-up:
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