I've been looking at the accelerator boards available for the A3000 and A4000. I've pretty much ruled out a 603e based board as I just as well spend that kind of money on an Acube A500, but what is the difference between an 040@50MHz and an 060@50MHz performance wise? OS3.5 and 3.9 were never optimized to run on the 060. Would it be advantageous to create a hack to allow 3.9 to at least use some of the improvements of the 060 over the 040? I was looking over the data sheets for the 060 last night. It seems to me that in order for the 060 to be compatible with 3.5 and 3.9 it has to act like it's an 040 negating most of the advantages of the 060.
I agree that the PPC-boards just ain't worth it, a NG Amiga runs software faster and better than the old board (yes I got a CSPPC). It was cool back then but it just isn't worth the cost, the SAM 460 is way more fun IMHO.
The biggest advantage with the 060 isn't just the speed but as mentioned that it runs cooler, no need for a fan and I didn't have any cooler on it at all. Very nice that you don't have to clean it or replace the fan, it just runs. I had an Apollo 4060 and later the CSPPC and what I can say is that the Apollo is a piece of crap! First of all the SCSI-part I couldn't get to work with anything what so ever. I tried all kinds of units and they all locked up the my a4k. Not even the people at the store where I bought it could make it work. It also had some low-power version of the 060 and slower RAM than the CSPPC. When I bought the CSPPC I was going to move over the 060 CPU to save some money only to find out that it wasn't compatible, a different version.
The faster RAM of the CSPPC probably made the biggest difference but perhaps the CPU too, I don't know. Playing ClickBooms Quake was a lot faster on the CSPPC (just talking about the 68k version now, offcourse the PPC version ran a lot faster).
The best card to buy is probably the CyberStorm Mk III with a 060, don't know how expensive it is. The Apollo 4060 is probably ok too if you don't need the SCSI-part but it isn't as fast. Also the 060 can play MP3s at full quality if that is important, the 040 @ 40MHz can not.
Two things that makes all the difference to me is 1. No need for any cooling solutions and 2. it's the fastest CPU there is for classic Amigas if you want to run games etc. Works very well with whdload.
If you can find a board that's not too expensive and also a NG Amiga I would say that you would get the best from both worlds. Sounds like you also like the OS so in that regard an NG Amiga is good for more modern stuff. It also includes an option to run old games through ADF-images and whdload by just double-clicking the icons so it works more or less like a real Amiga, that's what I did on my a4k in AOS 3.9 and I do the same in 4.1 now. It's still emulation though and untill a JIT-version of E-UAE is available 3D-games for example won't run fast enough. Works well with 2D-games though. Just some extra info. I hope that you'll find a nice CPU-board, it's a shame that there are nothing new available :-( .
