So I bought a boxed 520c off eBay and found it had a surprise Newer Technologies NUpowr 117MHz 603e/4MB processor upgrade card. I was mainly after the box and docs, i.e. ephemera, and as I have a 540c with a NUpowr 117MHz 603e/8MB processor upgrade card I wasn't exactly looking for one. It did get me thinking about the various upgrade cards for the PowerBook 500 series which lead me to this post.





It seems odd to me that Newer would design a different version of the board for 4MB vs 8MB versions. I had seen they offered 0, 4, and 8MB options but seemed like they could just include fewer RAM IC chips to achieve this...?

The Newer 8MB version layout looks a lot like Apple's 100MHz Power PPC upgrade card for the 500 series (that comes with 8MB of RAM) when you look at the ROM and RAM IC layout:




Some Google searches lead me to these pics of the Newer Tech 167MHz and 183MHz upgrade cards. Pretty neat:



Looks like the 167MHz card has 8MB with a layout somewhat like the Apple 100MHz and Newer 117MHz cards, would be nice to randomly find one of these!




I believe the 183MHz card eschews the RAM (0MB) in order to include 128KB of L2 cache, would be EXTRA nice to randomly find one of these!

A vague memory suggests that Newer actually made the Apple upgrade cards under contract, but I could be wrong about that.

Anyway, nice find!

How timely! This thread is a few weeks old, but it just happens that I finally got my NuPower 167 back from Europe this past weekend, after 6 long years!

If there's any information from it that might be useful to document (which can't be found in those photos), please let me know.

c