The Best Amiga Computer Is An A3000?

[McVenco]

Apart from all the functional reasons that are summed up above this post, there is one more reason why the A3000 is better than the A4000:

It's pretty!

The A4000 is just an altered Commodore PC desktop case, while the A3000 is a design of it's own.

[McVenco]

By just looking at the standard machine (not taking into account any addons like an accelerator or Picasso-IV) I will still vote for the A3000.

To modern day standards the SCSI-I is slow, true, but that's not what retro is about (and to me, Amiga is retro, and not competing to any modern day computer).
The only advantage of a standard A4000 are AGA and easy memory adding via SIMMs (which was just as expensive as ZIP ram back in the days), but AGA has not much of an advantage over ECS when you use it as a productivity machine (which they both are - want to play games? buy an A1200!). Who needs a 262,144 color Workbench when you're coding or writing some documents?

As for the tower versions and expansions: sure, the A4000T has faster SCSI, but when you add a Cyberstorm and/or Picasso, you must do that to the A3000T as well to have an honest comparison. Result? Still not much difference between the 2, apart from AGA, which you don't use much with that Picasso installed anyway. 2 video slots? Nice, but people who don't do any video-related stuff on their Amiga aren't likely to have much use for it.

The cases in overall view indeed again: each to his own taste. I find the A4000D very boring, and the A3000D very pretty. The A3000T might be a heavy beast with lots of screws, but at least you can take a side panel off without the need to topple the machine over because the A4000T's side panel also includes the top and bottom side of the case. But then again, I find the looks of the A4000T nicer than the A3000T (which looks a bit too massive)


Conclusion:
I would choose the A3000 when it comes to desktops and the A4000T when it comes to the tower versions. Any comparison between an A3000D and A4000T (or the other way round: A3000T vs. A4000D) is nonsense in my opinion. As for functionality, it's almost a tie between them. Like I said: you don't buy an A3000 or A4000 to play games, so please don't mention AGA. The only useful program that I know that uses AGA is DPaint.


End of rant. I'm now going to think happy thoughts again :-)

[McVenco]

alexh wrote:

Depends if you are coding for AGA ;-)

Then you probably are coding demos (or games), so then the A1200 is the machine you really want :-)

We bought our A4k's for demos, games and Zorro III RTG workbench.

I disagree with the demos and games. Sure, I may be a nutcase with way too many Amigas but when I came back to Amiga I wanted a bigbox to do productivity stuff and a wedge cased Amiga for games - games just 'feel' better when played on an A500 or 1200 :-)

The days of any Amiga program being "useful" are over. It is now purely a machine for nostalgia and fun.

And that's exactly the reason why it bothers me that people call the A3000 a useless piece of machinery. I have used an unexpanded A3000 as my main computer for several years (about a decade ago). It ran almost 24/7 and it never gave me ANY problems. I had an external Apple PhotoCD player as a single speed SCSI CD drive which was just perfect.
An A3000 can't take a Mediator? So what? If I want "retro" with PCI cards I'll buy a Pentium 2 and run windows 3.11.

If you value an Amiga by the way you can expand it then please throw away all A1000s and A600s since there's almost NO way to have use for these machines then.

[McVenco]

alexh wrote:

Why anyone would want anything other than an A1200, A4000 or CD32 is beyond me.

Anybody ever tell you you're an AGA wh*re? :-)

[McVenco]

A1260 wrote:
alexh & Crumb for the win!!!!!!!! the a3000 fanbois have been crushed!  :-D

Meh, I still don't see a winner. Most arguments against the A3000 are that it's a b*tch to upgrade, and expensive to upgrade... Also, people tend to forget that the A3000 is quite some years older than the A4000, so that's another reason why you can't compare them in a neutral way. They both are completely different machines for that matter.

And finally (I'm going to stop ranting now, honestly), it's all a matter of taste, and what you use your Amigas for.
Therefore *I* think the A600, A1000, CDTV and AmigaOne completely suck (burn all of them!), and the A500, A3000 and A4000T are cool.

[McVenco]

Crumb wrote:

That's strange because I know literally dozens of A4000 users and just one had to upgrade his buster.

I've had 2 A4000s with Buster 9. I still own one of these, and it even has a soldered Buster 9, rather than a socketed one. So Yay for not being able to upgrade it...

[McVenco]

leirbag28 wrote:

I have TONS of what I believe to be ZIP ram chips lying around...........I have alot!   if anyone wants them for their A3000...........they are FREE!

If they truly are ZIP chips that work in an A3000, I'll take 2 full sets to fill my A3000s!

[McVenco]

krize wrote:

How to discuss something like this ?!? The A4000 is clearly the better one, AGA is needed for all new demos and all the good old games...

AGA needed for all the good old games? So you mean there are no good OCS/ECS games (or demos)? What bs... :roll:

Personally, all my favourite games and demos run perfectly on a 1MB A500.