First I have permission from trusty to post these pics. This the first speed control that trusty has built. I asked him a year ago about a switch for the CPU power and 2 months ago we talked about it again and that is when he started to make this dream of mine to have a speed control come true! Well after trial and error he finally got the circuit to work. There is a little green LED and when the CPU is full speed the LED is on. At half speed the LED is dimmed. This is so you can tell that it is working. But after you put the heatsink on you will never be able to see it. The red and black wires are hooked to 3.3 volts and ground. The other 2 grey wire are to a switch. When the circuit is open it runs at full speed and when the circuit is closed the CPU drop to half power. When playing games that run to fast you can flip the switch on the fly and get normal speed and the turbo speed. It works great! No need to patch anymore for the CPU speed. But you should still run the RAM delimit program for the upgraded RAM the board has already. If I am missing anything let me know! BTW you can see that trusty has dremeled off the part number for the 3 major components that are mounted. This is the secret that I was talking about. I told you that the 1.4GHz will be changed forever!
Nice. Time to gather cash to get one of these boards from him since my current 1.4GHz has a dead TSOP and has to have a modchip to boot from.
My OCD will not allow me to use boards with a dead TSOP even know I use mod chips anyway. Plus I only use 1.0 and 1.1 boards for my personal consoles. I also only use minebea PSU's. They are the cleanest power and never die. That took my a long time to get enough of them. They seem to be the least used PSU of them all. Here is a full shot of the motherboard
Very nice... is this mod so you can switch between regular speed for retail games and then 1.4Ghz for emulators?
So essentially it is a Friendtech DreamX Xbox. That is dam cool How is the compatibility with Xbox games? Do they run properly when the cpu speed is cut in half?
Yes the slow right down to the proper speed. I do not even have to patch games anymore. I am looking to buy a DreamX 1480 if you know anyone that has one.
They might run a bit slower as the clock speed will essentially be a bit underclocked. Trysty's mod runs the CPU at 1.4GHz or about 1400MHz. The stock Xbox CPU runs at 733MHz. By cutting the CPU speed in half you will be running at 700MHz. A bit slower but it shouldn't be enough to notice unless you play a game that is CPU timing sensitive and you have the game completely memorized with times and such. I might notice it since I'm like that. Won't know until I get my own in.
Impressive mod, does this help out noticeably with the emulators? Do they have to be recoded or do the same old programs work at a higher speed with no issues?
The upgraded CPU makes a very considerable improvement in the speed of emulation in Project64. You should still patch your emulators so the program knows it's using a faster CPU.
From what I read in the past the DreamXs had a similar problem in that the cpu speed when switched down was a bit too fast at 740mhz I believe.
So I bought one of these. A lot more games are more compatible. BUT! Like trusty said, XBMC will still say its at 1400Mhz even when the switch is deactivated. You can figure that game X will use this variable for timing and by Murphy's Law, some part of it will not behave properly. For example GTA 3 and Vice City work with the switch, except the video playback is still way too fast. You can notice the same effects in Conker Live and Reloaded and HL2. GTA San Andreas will not work with the switch activated or deactivated, but It will work if you give it a custom patch looking for the clock rate in khz. Another downside is that the xbox doesn't perform as fast when the speed switch is on full speed than it does on an xbox without the speed switch. PJ64 doesn't play DK64 as beautifully as it did on my switchless 1.4G trusty. XMV playback isn't as fluid either. New patches will have to be developed that catch all of the timing instances.
