01 June 2017, 13:47 | #21 | |
Guru Meditating
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Quote:
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01 June 2017, 13:51 | #22 |
Bit Copying Bard
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01 June 2017, 14:37 | #23 |
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The A1200's expansion is similar to Zorro-II indeed, but it's a lot faster than Zorro-II so RTG will perform better on it than a Zorro-II big box Amiga. Zorro-III removes the need to push all transfers through the 8MB Z-II window that the A1200 is saddled with though, and adds DMA which gives it a big advantage over the A1200. But Zorro-III graphics cards are also slow in themselves, being based on GPUs from the late '80s or early '90s, so newer PCI cards have an advantage there, especially when it comes to running large screenmodes. The ultimate for performance therefore is probably a Zorro-III Amiga with a Mediator and a Radeon, or a Voodoo 3 if you're looking for 3D acceleration.
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01 June 2017, 19:21 | #24 |
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A4000 + Mediator 4000Di, + lots of cards and a nice fat accelerator (maybe even a blizzard upgraded to 300 or 350mhz if you can swing it).
If you go with a USB solution regardless of Mediator + PCI card or just a Z3 card, you'll solve 99% of your expandability issues: USB NIC, USB sound, USB storage...you'll only want for a graphics solution at that point. |
01 June 2017, 19:23 | #25 |
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Oh and on the issue of an A1200...with the caveat that I had an A1200...I liked the A1200...I wouldn't go with a tower solution. Too many failure points, plus timing issues on various board revisions, plus it's not really meant to go in a tower anyway...
I'd stick with a 3000 or 4000 for the reasons in my earlier post. |
01 June 2017, 19:42 | #26 |
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Not as "big", but I'd go for the A3000, it's arguably the best Amiga Commodore has ever built, and I do like the fact that it's a smaller box than the others.
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02 June 2017, 04:12 | #27 |
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I would say A4000d is the best option. The A4000T is really overkill nowadays since all those extra zorro and ISA cards aren't really needed anymore, nor are all the drive bays.
An A4000D has mounting positions for 2x internal 3.5" drives, 2x external 3.5" bays and one 5 1/4" bay for a DVD drive. Not that you even need that many drives since a single large drive gives you room for everything with maybe one 3.5" external bay for a CF card for removable storage. A3000 is a great machine but really you are just getting a built in flicker fixer and if you want to mess around with Zorro cards hope that you get one that has the latest DMAC and Ramsey (and Buster). With an A4000 you have to worry about what Buster version is onboard. With the A4000 you can upgrade the motherboard RAM to 64MB if you want, cheaply. But if you want top end performance, accelerators other than a basic A3640 (which you can upgrade to an 060 cheaply) cost too much. Really a Mediator saves you a fair amount of cash if you add up what it costs for Zorro GFX, Network, Sound and USB cards. |
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