Mediator PCI 4000Di 3V

[ElectroBlaster]

Is this worth purchasing?

Mediator PCI 4000Di 3V

Any pitfalls, annoyances or bugs etc.

[indigolemon]

The Mediator boards work well, but like many hardware mods for the Amiga they are an insanely cunning hack to allow you to use PCI cards in a machine that never officially supported them. If installing one, I suggest doing so as part of a clean OS install - I fought for ages to get my Mediator working and all it took was an afternoon of reinstalling stuff and it's been solid ever since. The wisdom of Daedalus helped there!

The 3V is handy as it allows you access to newer PCI cards, including the supported Radeon graphics cards (which is what I use).

I have a Mediator 1200TX in my 1200, and it allows me to use an ATX pc power supply too which is great - I'm not 100% sure if you'd need an ATX supply in your Amiga 4000 to use with the 4000Di in order to provide the required 3v.

[Wrangler]

Originally Posted by indigolemon

I'm not 100% sure if you'd need an ATX supply in your Amiga 4000 to use with the 4000Di in order to provide the required 3v.

You don't: the Mediator creates a 3v line from the Amiga's normal 5v line and so works off the original PSU.

[trixster]

They can be quite unreliable, and a pig to set up if you're unable/unwilling to reinstall workbench from scratch. And even once it's up and running it will sometimes refuse to 'see' some or all of your pci cards after a warm reboot.

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by ElectroBlaster

Is this worth purchasing?

Mediator PCI 4000Di 3V

Any pitfalls, annoyances or bugs etc.

There's a pretty good guide you might want to read: http://mediators.github.io/

Like everything if you know how to set it up and know how to fix things when they go wrong then they're fine.

The other thing to watch out for is assuming things will work when they don't. Like "Hey I'll just get a USB card and plug a network, sound and webcam into it" the first two don't work but maybe the third does (but probably not). Or "I'll just buy this PCI sound card which does hardware decoding so I can play high quality MP3s with an 030" -it doesn't work that way, the PCI sound cards don't actually do any hardware decoding. Or my favorite "I'll buy this $10 PCI SCSI-Ultra 320 card and it'll be 100x faster than onboard IDE" -no it will run at about 2-3MB/s.

There was a bad run of 3V Mediators that a handful of people got which has given them a bad reputation recently. Elbox has seemed to fix these boards when users had enough patience to get them repaired under warranty.

The basic question is if you add up the costs of getting a mediator and a few PCI cards vs buying the Zorro equivalents do you come out ahead? Usually this will be true unless you just throw money at ebay/amibay without actually paying attention.