Christmas Gifts from Elbox

[DJS]

Elbox Computer wishes Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all Amiga users!

For a Christmas Gift, Elbox will release the new pci.library, which allows to use the PCI gfx cards' memory (Voodoo 3/4/5 and Radeon 9000/9200/9250) as Amiga system memory also for users of Mediators for A1200. The minimum hardware requirement for this feature is an Amiga 1200 computer with any A1200 Mediator model (1200, ZIV, 1200LT2, 1200LT4, 1200SX, 1200TX), a turbo card based on 68030 with MMU and the Voodoo 3 or Radeon 9200 gfx card. In case of the Radeon gfx card the new drivers enable adding even up to 250 MB of DDR400 SDRAM to the A1200 system memory!

For Amiga 3000 and 4000 users, Elbox extends the bundle offer till the end of the year for the Mediator PCI busboards for A3000 and A4000 computers with a special 5V-only version of the Mobility Radeon 9200 gfx card with 256MB of fast SGRAM memory.

If you plan on purchasing any Elbox products in near future, do it by the end of this year. With the New Year, prices for most of them (Mediators, FastATA, memory expansions, etc.) will go up about 30%. This will be due to much higher costs of the components used in the production. Most of the necessary connectors and 5V CPLD chips are now very difficult to acquire and much more expensive than ever before.


Elbox Computer Team

[DJS]

Well, they may be more fair about posting real benchmarks and tech info about their products (like Individual Computers does), but it's very good about their commitment on the Amiga side.

The software for adding the part of gfx card SDRAM to Amiga system memory was already released -- and was released for free for all Mediator users. So, each user of Mediator for A1200 (or A3/4000) with any supported PCI gfx card can check this speed in his specific config.


The speed of the Radeon SDRAM configured as Amiga 1200 system memory is on about the same level as in A3000 and A4000 computers. Benchmarks of the Radeon memory configured as Amiga system memory were posted on Amiga.org in this thread.
 
The SDRAM memory on the Radeon card is accessible from three sides: 1) from Amiga processor, 2) from the busmaster PCI cards, 3) from the Radeon gfx chipset.

1) The speed of this memory from Amiga processor accesses is limited by hardware design of the Amiga 1200 CPU slot interface of the specific turbo card. This speed varies from 5 MB/s to 13 MB/s depending of the turbo card model.

2) The speed from PCI busmaster cards sitting in the PCI slots of Mediator busboard is limited by gfx card design. For Radeon 9200 based on M9+ chipset write speed is up to 128 MB/s (in the burst mode), read speed is up to about 50 MB/s.

3) The SDRAM speed when accessing from M9+ core is up to 4 GB/s.