1 Gig Ram in a A3000?

[Amiduffer]

I got the Commodore hardware reference books version 3, and in one of them, listing how much Ram can be put in each of the models, it says that the max Ram for the A3000 is 1 Gig.:-o Has anyone actually put that much in their A3k?

[shaf]

I think that was assuming that ZIPPs could actually get that large. Theoretically it could be done with the appropriate memory expanders using more standard SIMMs.

The most memory My A4000 ever had was 128 MB using 4 32MB SIMMs on my Warpengine Board.

Shaf

[Tenacious]

2 thoughts

1  You would think some manufacturer would have made a Zorro III memory board using modern modules, or better, a multifunction board (memory, USB, Ethernet, clockport, sound mixer, etc) by now.

2  On the other hand, there aren't too many Amiga apps that eat more than a few megs of ram.  This is good for all my other classic Amigas. Grin

[Matt_H]

I think that was assuming that ZIPPs could actually get that large. Theoretically it could be done with the appropriate memory expanders using more standard SIMMs.

Nope. The sockets can only address 16MB. There'd have to be a major rework to get 1GB from there. A Zorro III board could do it easily, though.

[Zac67]

1 GB is the largest memory size a single Zorro III card can support. Of course you could add multiple such - theoretical - cards to get to the physical maximum of 4 GB (AmigaOS could only use close to 2 GB of it).

[alexh]

1 GB is the entire Zorro III space isnt it?

The most RAM I ever had in an A3000 was:

Motherboard = 16 + 2
Accelerator = 128
DKB3128     = 128
Total       = 274 Mbytes

I did have more in my subsequent A4000 because it had a Fastlane SCSI card with another 64Mbytes.

But I never used anywhere near that much RAM. I doubt any software ever used more than 64Mbytes.

[rare_j]

I've never filled the 64 Mbytes of Fast Mem in my A1200 during normal working use.
The miserly 2Mbytes of Chip Mem is another matter entirely...

[jj]

Some of the PPC game ports really need more than 64mb

[alexh]

Like I can afford a CSPPC

[mike-]

alexh wrote:
Like I can afford a CSPPC

Sure you can, sell the house, sell your near family, quit smoking, quit drinking, take up a loan, start living on the streets and eat dog food.

[Zac67]

alexh wrote:
1 GB is the entire Zorro III space isnt it?

Hmm - good question. 1 GB definitely is the largest board size (er_Type=1110x110, er_Flags=1x11xxxx), possibly it's all there is.

The A3000's service manual says:

$08000000-$0FFFFFFF 32 bit ram expansion space. This grows up from $08000000.

This seems to be the 128 MB 'autoconfigured' on a CPU card.

$10000000-$EFFFFFFF 32 bit 'other' expansion space.

I guess that's Z III autoconfig space - 3.5 GB.

No idea whether it's really implemented that way though - would be a fun project to find out.  ;-)

My Merlin gfx card lives at $40000000 (A3000), so possibly the lower 1 GB is reserved for non Z3 stuff.

[Amiduffer]

That was nice of the engineers to give us the means of shoving a lot of RAM in there, even if you never use most of it. What programs in general use the most amount of RAM? ECS level that is.

[alexh]

In my case... RAD (reset recoverable RAM disk)

[Effy]

I know that years ago 64+32 Mb was simply not enough to unzip a cd full of demo's and games into the Ram Disk  :lol:
On the other hand, it would be a nice idea to use an older Ram server board on the Amiga, for example the Ram board of a HP server model LX Pro, it has got 16 slots for maximum 128 Mb for each module, giving a total of eh, 2 Gb  :-o

[rkauer]

 Please, think outside of the box!

 Since any humble 020 can access 4Gb, why not construct an interface?

 Even 2Gb of continuous RAM expansion can be constructed.