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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: paulgerman on March 21, 2004, 01:13:06 AM
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I don't know what to buy a3000 or a 4000 , i know that the price is more bigger for the a4000 , but if i buy the a3000 am i going to see a big difference , ( i know that the a4000 can play more aga games , but i am not going to play so many game ) , i just want to run software .
Which one is more cheapest to update in hardware the a3000 or the a4000 ?
What do you think guys , which one i should buy ?
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They seem almost identical minus the AGA in the 4000.
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What are you saying ?
The a3000 use high density floppy or is just the a4000 ?
Can i use pc floppy in both
system ?
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I htink some of the 3000s may only have DD drives, but I believe the 4000s usually have HD drives, they can't use most PC drives though, no. Not without a 'catweasel' anyhow.
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Hi,
@paulgerman
I own both, and I like the A4000 more.
Not only does it play better games, but when you really look at it, the A3000 and the A4000 cost just about the same to upgrade, the A4000 has IDE and AGA, the A3000 has SCSI and can use VGA monitors. In order to use IDE on A3000 you have to buy expensive card, in order to use SCSI you can buy one from ebay at good price, in order to use VGA on A4000 you must buy a graphics card ( I have Picasso II)
A3000 has 880K floppy, A4000 has high density floppy.
I like my A4000 better.
For speed you have to buy A3640 card for A3000 most A4000 are 040 ready.
Smerf
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smerf wrote:
For speed you have to buy A3640 card for A3000 most A4000 are 040 ready.
Well, for speed you have to buy a good quality 68040/68060/PPC card, with a local memory bus.
The 4000/040 (using the 3640 card) is totally crippled by it's motherboard memory bandwidth.
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Let's say this. I love my Amiga 4000's. I have 2 of my own and an Amiga 2000.
Pluto, which is my first Amiga 4000, has the 3.1 roms in her, has a CyberVision GFX card, and soon will become my towered beauty with a Voodoo(haven't decided Mediator or Promo).
Cecilia, my other Amiga 4000, has her set of 3.1 roms coming any day now. She is going to be using all SCSI once I change out the icky Rev .9 Super Buster of hers.
Amanda, my Amiga 2000, is just my video toaster baby.
As always, try to get a 4000 with a Super Buster 11, check the better next to the memory chips on the motherboard. Demand the full 16Megs of fast memory. No reason you should get one without it. Enjoy.
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Out of the box, the A3000 is IMHO better. Built in flicker fixer, scsi, etc. And other nice things like socketed/upgradable/repairable chips, 030 fallback (not so needed anymore).
BTW, my A3000/030-25MHz came with a HD floppy. I'm sure others did also.
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@adolescent
The only 3000 I would get would be a 3000UX. My high school had one, and just last week I saw a guy that had on of those 3000UX running AMIX, and a farm load of AMD FX-51's in a cluster. I tell you them freaky Unix geeks.
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"stupid Internet Explorer" repeat
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Totally depends...purey from a "design" perspective, the
3000 was overall superior. However, even if you only
plan on running WB apps, the bandwidth of AGA will make
the 4000 far nicer to work with.
As far as upgrading, the costs are ultimately the same,
except you can probably get away with not towering a
4000.
--edit
Personally?? I'd take the 4000 over the 3000, unless it was a 3000+.
If you plan on spending a lot to upgrade it, and don't need AGA,
get whatever's cheaper.
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Hi,
I personally like the A3000 more, the SCSI-Controller and the build-in flicker-fixer are great.
The costs for expanding are quite equal for both, the A4000 and the A3000. The build-in flicker-fixer of the A3000 save you the costs for a new monitor.
Noster
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@justthatgood
The only difference between A3000 and A3000UX is that the UX version came with a tape drive, and the AMIX OS instead of the regular AmigaOS.. :)
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Personally I think the A3000 is better.. The only thing it really lacks, in my opinion, is AGA, but with most modern software you need a graphics card anyway so it doesnt matter that much... And if you want to add a CD-ROM to your 3000, it doesnt matter that there isnt a drive bay for it... Just add one externally! SCSI rules... :)
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@Orjan
Hence both tend to be really hard to find in some places. Not everyone needs nor wants to endure the price gouging of SCSI. I know all to well the suffering that many people have paid to keep their systems SCSI. In some circumstances, people would rather take a little bit of a CPU load hit, use very easily found IDE , then have to replace then with expensive SCSI counterparts.
I'm sure all over Europe they have SCSI stuff flowing from the brims and walls of every country. But over here in the USA (that's right, what's suppose to be the most finacially packing country in the world) not all cities and many states have a lot of scsi stuff in it. Unless you goto trade shows (most of the good stuff gets snatched up quick), go out of state (if you have the time), go on eBay (wait on shipping, and risk dealing with rude sellers).
And yes I do like having a internal CD-RW. That's just me...
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Don't get an A3000 unless it's completely updated with the latest Ramsey/dmac/buster/kickstart. You'll have to invest a lot of money and you'll still have a system worse than an A4000.
The A3000's scsi is slow compared to any scsi included with an accelerator, and if you want to use the scsi of an accelerator you have to perform the int2 modification.
The flicker fixer isn't IMHO a good reason to buy a 3000. I had one and I sold it fast to buy an A4000 and it was a very good move.
You have to put cd-roms and other devices in external cases because you can't fit one in the standard desktop case. On the A4000 you can put 3 hds, a disk drive and a cd-writer... two next to the PSU and one under the disk drive... It's one of the best designed amiga cases.
My A4000T case isn't so nice, I can only put 5 drives including 3'5 and 5'1/4... it takes a lot of space for nothing...
If you want PCIs you can´t put the pci bridge inside the A3000 case and you have to towerize it... if you want PCIs with the original A4000 case you can fit a mediator4000D or a G-Rex 4000...
If you buy an A3000 you'll find that you can't fill all the simm sockets of your accelerator because it doesn't fit well... on Amigas 4000 you can fill all the banks without problems...
Go for the A4000...
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Out of the box, the A3000 is IMHO better. Built in flicker fixer, scsi, etc. And other nice things like socketed/upgradable/repairable chips, 030 fallback (not so needed anymore).
sure is my a4000 ls a cheaply made badly thought out machine scusi on my a3000 is much better than ide on the 4000 plus you can conect more devices than with ide.
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If you can find a good A3000 you would be a fool to not get it over an A4000. You mention you dont care about AGA. The A3000 comes with SCSI built in. You can find loads of fast SCSI drives from CD-RW to Hard disks for next to nothing on ebay. The flicker fixer alone is worth getting it over an A4000. Do you have a monitor capable of displaying Amiga modes? If not you MUST get one or spend another $120 on a flicker fixer/scan doubler for the A4000. The IDE in the A4000 is crap. Its not buffered and you need special software to make it work with a CD-ROM AFAIK. You can still get a mediator for the A3000 and get just about all the same upgrades a 4000 can use for the same price. Look below for my A3000 specs.
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@paulgerman
Great, see what you have caused. You thought you have asked a simple, innocent question, but you have unleashed the mighty battle of the Big Boxes. I hope all the mud flinging has given you something to think about.
BTW A4000's rule :-D