apollo vs blizzard vs gvp

[3246251196]

i need a 030. i see some good ones. i also see this:

 
GVP Amiga 1200 030 / 40 Accelerator + 4mb Ram & FPU

i have been told by a source that GVP is not the way to go for fears of it not being good to uprgrade.

how do you people feel?

[Piru]

GVP is not using regular SIMMs for memory, so the modules cost their weight in gold (or so).

If only you will never upgrade the memory (believe me you will want to upgrade some day), consider GVP.

[3246251196]

okay. point taken

thanks for the help

[krize]

i would recoemnd the Blizzard cards, very reliable and doesnt need special ram...

Seach them up at amiga hardware base..

[Ilwrath]

The GVP and Phase 5 (Blizzard) cards are both excellent choices.  But, of course, as stated, those GVP SIMMS are rare and expensive.  If I wanted buy two 16MB chips to max mine, it would cost me more than the board, 8MB, and SCSI module did, combined.

[3246251196]

apollo is roughly equivalent to blizzard, also?

[humppa]

apollo is roughly equivalent to blizzard, also?

Memory access is a lot faster on Apollo cards than on Blizzards.
You will also notice a big increase of IDE HD transfer speeds (using either Idefix Express or Powerflyer) when using an Apollo over a Blizzard.

[Piru]

...But it should be pointed out that by doing so Apollo break some of the timing specs. Thus, Apollo is much more prone to have timing related issues. Also I am not that sure about the "a lot faster" bit. Faster perhaps, but not that much IMO.

Also Apollo has no real SCSI, which Blizzards do have (SCSI Kit).

Apollo can't take as much memory as Blizzards.

Blizzards can be disabled from keyboard and you can use the regular 68EC020 CPU if you need to (some really picky games/demos perhaps?). Apollo can't be disabled.

Blizzards are commonly considered much more robust and better designed.

I'm not saying Apollos are useless, I'm sure they are good cards in their own way. They sure are cheaper than Blizzard, that's a big plus.

[humppa]

I switched from an Apollo 1240 to a BPPC (040 at 25Mhz) and I must say that it "feels" a lot slower.
The main advantage is the PPC of course (although I use it less than I thought) and that I am no longer limited to just 32MB of RAM.
Using the Apollo however, FastMem access (tested using Sysspeed) was around 50% faster and transfer rates of my Idefix Express were about 2MB/s higher than with the BPPC.

I never had any stability issues with it.

[Piru]

That sounds weird, but I have to admit I only have experience of BPPC 060.

The Blizzard 1230 MK-III I had before was fast in IDE transfer at least.

[itix]

When I had my A1200 with BPPC (040) Idefix Express never gave any advantage. Transfer rates were the same no matter were I using Express adapter or not.

IDE transfer rates were probably even slower than with Blizzard-VI 030/50MHz.

For fastmem access it also depends on memory configuration. I remember tuning up settings until my A1200 just crashed :-P

[AmigaMance]

@All

I switched from an Apollo 1240 to a BPPC (040 at 25Mhz) and I must say that it "feels" a lot slower.
The main advantage is the PPC of course (although I use it less than I thought) and that I am no longer limited to just 32MB of RAM.
Using the Apollo however, FastMem access (tested using Sysspeed) was around 50% faster and transfer rates of my Idefix Express were about 2MB/s higher than with the BPPC.

That sounds weird, but I have to admit I only have experience of BPPC 060.

The Blizzard 1230 MK-III I had before was fast in IDE transfer at least.

When I had my A1200 with BPPC (040) Idefix Express never gave any advantage. Transfer rates were the same no matter were I using Express adapter or not.

IDE transfer rates were probably even slower than with Blizzard-VI 030/50MHz.

 Hmmm... All of the above posts are suggesting that the slow memory/hd access concerns the BPPC specifically and not all of the Blizzard cards.
 Also, look what i found in the readme of the idefix turbo patch:

This is a small patch for the great IDEfix97 software by Oliver Kastl
It patches some routines in the IDEfix executable to make it a bit faster.
Usually you should get a 100-300KB speedup on IDE HD drives.
This is very good since PPC Blizzard cards are realy slow with IDE HD's

 So, what do you think?

[srg86]

@AmigaMance wrote:

I can't remember where it was, but I have read somewhere that the memory access speed on the BPPC is quite slow compaired to other blizzard cards.

[humppa]

Concerning memory access, also a Blizzard 1260 is slow compared to an Apollo 1260.
Check out this thread for example.

"On the overall ratings I got the following:

                  Integer    Graphics   FPU
Apollo 1260        15.71      3.62     46.20
Blizzard 1260      13.70      3.53     45.90
Apollo faster by    15%       2,5%      0,7%

The largest difference was on the MemTest test, where
Apollo was ~26 % faster than Blizzard.

Apollo was fastest on 17-18 of the 20 tests. However, most
tests gave approx. the same result. It seems like Apollo
has faster memory access which makes it faster on memory
intensive tests.

With SCSISpeed, Apollo got the best transfers from
the IDE drive: Up to 1,95 MB/sek, as opposed to 1,8 MB/
sec with Blizzard.

With Busspeed by Michael Van Elst (sp? - sorry if wrong),
the maximum for Apollo was 57 MB/sec as opposed to
50 MB/sec with Blizzard."

[CLS2086]

don't forget about the compatibility !

Yesterday, I tried to play "Lagaf - Les aventures de Moktar -Zou zou zou bi da" (a.k.a. "Titus the Fox" with Titus in place of Moktar) with the original floppy.
It often refused to work when the fastram was "on" with my BPPC 040RC/256mb and was slow to "decompress" each level.
When I replaced it with my BZ 1230-IV/FPU/196mb, it worked without any trick, and i could set the screenmode in 60hz in the "Early" !

So mind about what are you going to do with your card.