i agree for the most part, but the 4000 with surface mount is what makes it so reliable. those 20+ year old sockets in the 3000 often tarnish and the chips need reseating.
Not only the caps but also sockets seem to be higher quality on the 3000 and 3000T than 4000 or 4000T. I have a early revision 4000T with a warped Buster socket (heat?) and my 4000 sockets look cheap. C= tried to be more professional for awhile during the 3000 days (remember the gold service plan?) and then gave it up and went back to making hardware as cheap as possible (maybe because of money problems by that time or the new management sacking the guys that were doing a good job).
The 3000 was a good design memory wise and with scsi,but some problems you run into: most came with buster7,which don't support Zorro-3 DMA or Quick Interrupts, and they don't attempt to translate local bus burst cycles into Zorro-3 burst cycles-easily upgraded.
With a gfx board, upgrading to a Buster 11 gives a substantial speedup over the slow Buster 7 and seemed to me to be more reliable. It's nice that the Buster is in a socket which is not the case on many of the 4000(T)s.
next is the dmac2/ramsey4 which are part of the problem of detecting static column ram when used with 3640 cards-not a problem in most cases since using pagemode in the first bank works around this, ideally the dmac4/ramsey7 was the upgrade.
I believe the Buster 11 has a workaround which fixes the problem in Ramsey. I have all static column zip ram in my 3000s with Buster 11 (and didn't notice a problem with the A3640). The Ramsey 7 does speed up motherboard memory transfers and I didn't notice any problems without the super DMAC (but I had Buster 11). Oddly, the rare Super DMAC caused SCSI problems when I added it to this setup with an A3640. There are likely some bugs here which the 4000(T) has worked out and there is probably a modest performance gain in memory and Zorro. AGA is nice to have for games but a gfx board blows it away in performance.
Although the case looks cool, you have to tear it almost completely down to do anything inside. Most accelerators don't fit well with ram except the warpengine 3040.The a3640 will fit with a microscopic fan or large wide heatsink seen in some 4000t's. You still cant have any 5.25" cdrom etc inside,so external scsi case for that-which isnt a big deal.
Yea, too bad they didn't make the 3000 case a little taller and put a 5.25" bay in but it's not too big of deal with Ethernet or USB. The compact size isn't so bad except when running a hot 68040. Accelerators with memory could be made smaller today, if somebody would make one for the big boxes (68060 or FPGA).
It needs Int2 wire soldered for the accelerator scsi usually.
Wd33c93 needs upgraded to rev8 or amd 33c93a to fix some ssi troubles when using multiple drives/cdroms etc- most came with rev4 proto chips or earlier.
These are easy and not even necessary most of the time. The SCSI chip upgrade does help SCSI performance (requires synchronous mode in SCSI settings). Like the Buster 11, it is a nice upgrade which helps performance and stability (kill 2 birds with 1 stone).
fix all that and the battery and it makes for a solid machine, i ran one to death back in the 90's stuffed full of cards. it never missed a beat but i still love the 4000(t) and its cheaper in the long run since it usually has the latest ramsey,dmac,buster.
Besides the lower quality electronics on the 4000(T), the 4000T has way too many connections and wires that can be loose. Other than that, the 4000T performance, modularity, and ergonomics are nice. The 4000 is lacking in some areas compared to the 3000 but an accelerator and gfx board can fix most of what it lacks. The quality issue is always in the back of my mind though.
