re centris math coprocessor option david anthony guevara cup portal com writes sorry if this is a faq i don t normally read comp sys mac hardware i am purchasing a couple of centris s i configured the systems as follows eight mb ram ethernet mb vram math coprocessor option my purchasing agent told me about the math coprocessor option and sent me the apple summary documentation to prove it i ordered the coprocessor option but i m really not sure that we needed it i thought the chip had a math coprocessor built into it has apple had a math coprocessor chip architectured to keep up with the speed of the chip in the centris i am concerned that i may have set up a hardware bottleneck apple has really confused people with this whole thing i think we ll be answering this question for about the next year or so there is no option to get an fpu on a c what you have is a choice of cpus there is the lc that does not have an integrated fpu like the full and is only present in the base model of the c appleusa and there is the full which you get when you order anything other than the base configuration therefore since you have ordered one of the mb versions with on board ethernet models you will not be getting the lc but even if you wanted to have the lc you wouldn t be able to order a c with mb ram on board ethernet and an lc it s not an option also a note to people out there that have c s and c s thinking that there is an optional fpu the class chip cannot recognize an external fpu so there is no socket on the motherboard for a fpu chip and you cannot go out and purchase an fpu on a pds card or something like that the only way to get an fpu in these machines is to replace the lc with a full and if you have a c you will not need to worry about a heat sink if you do replace the lc with the full but if you have a c you do need to have a heat sink hades
