Upgrade 1200 or sell and find 3000?

[mechy]

If you ever plan on going online the A1200 is able to use cheap, readily-available PCMCIA network cards, but the A3000 is limited to rare, out-of-production, expensive Zorro network cards. Also the A1200 is nicer to type on.

awww now cammy,you must be joking the 3000 is a fine machine with a real keyboard,not one with a chicken mcnugget return key.

you are right about the zorro cards,but they arent that expensive used.
not to mention the 3000 has a proper expansion bus and a good psu compared to a stock 1200's

add a mediator or zorro3 gfx card and the 3k is pretty good. A A4000 makes more sense tho, why not move up to the next AGA machine.

mech

[mechy]

The dell sl2320L,st2320l,sl2420l and st2420l monitors support 15khz from the amiga no problem. These are not too hard to get monitors in the USA.

mech

Nope, no tower, just the standard wedge case.  I want to play around with some of the graphics programs.  I do alot of screen printing design that I'd like to try using the Amiga for instead of my PC, especially since most of the equipment I have for doing it is older.  I'd also like to use WHDLoad for playing older games.

My biggest problem with the 1200 is the 15khz output.  I have several monitors here and none support it, whereas an A3000 would be able to have an RTG card added and I'd be able to use the same monitor for both RTG and ECS output due to the built-in scan doubler.  The A1200 only appears to have one video card upgrade available which is paired with the Blizzard PPC board from my understanding and I'd still need an Indivision AGA somewhere.

EDIT: Just saw the other reply - I have a DLink PCMCIA card on the way.

[mechy]

Ups and downs for both:
 
3000 benefits:
Zorro slots for easy expansion.
Built-in scan doubler
Comes with 030 as standard
SCSI interface for CD ROM and hard drive
 
1200 benefits:
Many cheap accelerator cards available
PCMCIA slot.
IDE slot.
AGA.
 
 
In the end, for heavy expansion its easier to start with a 3000, since towering a 1200 is a fair amount of work, cost and fuss.
If you want RTG, its pretty much 3000 or towered 1200 anyways.
 
On the other side, its easier to fit simple IDE CF options to the 1200, you get PCMCIA for networking and file transfers, and you get AGA, which opens some software options.

You forgot a few things here.I love the 3000 and 1200 but...
The 3000 will likely have a 030/25, old buster 7,9 if your lucky. Need upgraded for zorro3 operation,need a updated scsi chip(not always). The 3000 will probabaly need 3.1 roms,it will have a old dmac2 and ramsey 4 also.  it uses more expensive zip ram. it has a 030/25 (in most cases),no place for cd/dvd rom.Of course if you can find one cheap with all this your golden.

The 4000 makes most sense, it has a 040/25 stock and at least 3.0 roms,can take 16MB of easy/cheap 72 pin simms,is AGA,has latest ramsey etc. chips(buster11 except some came with buster 9-which is still better than buster 7 which has broken zorro3),it has a slightly better power supply,room for a cd/dvd. Can add a pal/ntsc switch if needed. 4000's Can usually be picked up in the $300-500 usd range in stock 040 form..

The 1200 makes the least sense. you would need a tower, accelerator,bus board expansion,new power supply,etc. its pcmcia is a nice thing,but its ide is unbuffered and slow.by the time you buy all these addons its will be as much as a 4000 and still not be a fast.Bringing a 1200 up to this spec would cost way more and still be slower in most cases.