Dear Tjaoz,
> If you write about USB card prices maybe you should compare prices for
> all the USB controllers for Amiga or for MorphOS.
I fully agree with you in this point.
But you should do it the right way. Unfortunately, the Amiga does not have
a PCI bus, so you have to add at least a PCI busboard. According to Elbox
official price lists, you can take about 44EUR per PCI slot (total price of
bus board, divided by number of slots; averaged about the 1200 models).
And we will forget about the PCI graphic card you need for "DMA".
So, let's see...
> Spider II (5 ports) + Drivers + Poseidon ~= $70
You know, the exchange rate is 1 EUR = 1.17 US$ at the moment. Elbox prices are
in EUR. So we get:
Spider II (5 ports) + Drivers + Poseidon + PCI slot ~= 112EUR
Oops. I nearly made a mistake. Elbox omits the VAT, which is 16% here in Germany.
So, next iteration should give the correct number:
Spider II (5 ports) + Drivers + Poseidon + PCI slot + 16% VAT ~= 130EUR
The ALGOR price is also in EUR, and includes VAT.
So we have to correct another mistake of yours:
> Algor (3 ports) + Driver +Poseidon ~= $115
Algor (3 ports) + Driver + Poseidon ~= 115EUR
My god. Now the Spider II is 15 EUR more expensive... in your "comparison" it was
45 EUR *cheaper* ?!? What happened ?!?
BTW, I smell a Rat. At least, you leave out information if it doesn't fit into
your conclusion. The ALGOR has half meg of FlashROM which you can use for some
nice little things (e.g. ever tried to cold boot from a Spider II with some
flash card reader ?). So:
Algor (3 ports) + Driver + Poseidon + 512kB FlashROM ~= 115EUR
Spider II (5 ports) + Drivers + Poseidon + PCI slot + 0kB FlashROM ~= 130EUR
> You should add the part of Windows or Mac OS price to the Walmart card price
> if you compare it to Spider II + Drivers + Poseidon.
Ah ! Here you take something into account you have to buy extra, as it helps your
conclusion. In your own "comparision" above, you left these things out for the same
reason. Quite interesting.
> BTW. This $35 WalMart card is based on the old NEC USB chipset.
Yes, right. But with a 15MB/s bottleneck a 20% gain in bandwidth won't be noticeable,
unfortunately. This will only account if both USB controller and system CPU share the
same PCI bus.
Hope you don't have a job you have to calculate a lot
Michael