Most powerful PPC that can be put in an A1200?

[NovaCoder]

again, you are missing the point. for a plain a1200, what other option do you have to get RTG graphics and access to OS4?

PPC is pretty pointless in a 1200, RTG is nice to have of course but you can still get a pretty decent WB display happening with just an Indivision AGA and for games and most of the legacy applications AGA (68k) is all you need.

[NovaCoder]

Quick question:
Is there any benefit to an Apollo over a Blizzard?

I've been offered an Apollo 1240 with one SIMM slot. Would it be hard to upgrade it to a 060 CPU and a second RAM slot?

How much do Blizzard 1260s usually go for these days?

I'd very much like to upgrade my Amiga 1200 to an 80 MHz 68060 (AFAIK, something that works with both brands, Apollo and Blizzard) but am a bit concerned that an Apollo might not be as good as a Blizzard due to having much less RAM.

Apollo's are cheaper which is the main benefit....you can also clock them higher (usually, not always true).  This appears to be because an Apollo only accesses it's FASTRAM at 50% of the CPU speed whereas a Blizzard does it 1:1.  That means an Apollo can (sometimes) be clocked right up to 100Mhz with a decent CPU and RAM (depends on the MACH chips) whereas a Blizzard can normally only go to about 80Mhz (even with fast memory).  This means that a Blizzard should produce more MIPS at the same clock speed as an Apollo (in theory).

Another thing to consider is that (I believe) Blizzards are 'buffered' across the Zorro bus when (in theory) means that they do not access CHIPRAM as fast as Apollo cards.   This may have been changed/improved with the latest official 060 libraries but I'm not sure.

The main downside with the Apollos is the lack of memory, only 32mb can be used if you still want to use your desktop case.   While 32mb is fine for most things, things like web browsing are obviously going to need more.

Some people say Apollos are less reliable or less compatible than Blizzards but so far I've been 100% happy with my overclocked Apollo (which has it's MACH chip soldered on to improve stability).

Apollo @ 80Mhz

[NovaCoder]

Just got myself a Blizzard 1260 and wanted to do a speed comparison with an Apollo 1260 as there is so much conflicting bullsh*t written about this subject.


Ok, I spent the day yesterday setting up my new Blizzard and can now do some speed comparisons between the two.

My Blizz is currently running at 75 MHz vs my Apollo that runs at 80 Mhz so keep that in mind.

I'll be uploading both SysSpeed modules to AmiNet soon for people to compare (I might whack the Blizzard up to 80 Mhz first though if my other 128Mb SIM fits in it ok).

With a standard BB2 3.9 system the fast-ram access speed it is roughly 30% quicker than the Apollo, it surprising matches the chip-ram speed of the Apollo in most cases but for a couple of the test the Apollo beats the Blizz by about 20% (you'll need to download the modules to get the exact ratings).

The HD transfer rate was terrible with just BB2 (about 1 MB/s) but the excellent BlizKick got that up to a more respectable 3 MB/s (this is with an IdeFixExpress). My Apollo managed about 3.5 MB/s with the same setup so that's where it's faster chip-ram access is helping. I've got a brand-new FAST-ATA sitting in a box next to my 1200 which should help boost that speed a little

The MIPS are also interesting, the Blizz is running at 99.5 MIPS vs the 104.5 of the Apollo (remember that the Apollo is running 5 MHz faster).

As for real world game testing:

BOOM 060 runs 'Return to Saturn' much better than on the Apollo, it's now as smooth as butter and can even run full-screen without any slow-down. AmiQuake AGA is a bit strange, the FPS in the time-demo has gone up from 12.9 to 13.4 but it doesn't actually feel quite as fast to play (maybe this is just in my head).

I'm not sure if it's the hardware that is really making the difference, I think a large part of it may be down to the superior 060 library and the excellent BlizKick utility.

New Blizzard 1260 in action

I'll try and remember to update this thread with the names of the SysSpeed modules.