New A4000, some questions...

[alberonn]

I have read that there are speed issues with accessing the memory on your motherboard with the A4000. If you have a processor card with RAM on it would be faster, even if it was another 25mHz '040 CPU on that board.

I have an A4000D in a Power Tower case, with fully populated RAM on the motherboard and the stock CBM '040 processor board. Unfortunately, I don't have the cash for the Accelerators available at the Amiga stores online. They all seem to just have the PhaseV boards, ect. And yes, I do run into speed issues myself from time to time. My biggest problem is with running out of RAM though. (Another reason to try to find a processor board, even an older one as long as you can add RAM to it.)

One thing that gave me a bit of speed was adding a Gfx card since this took a lot of load off of the custom chips. I have a PicassoIV which has the built in Flicker-fixer/Scan-Doubler so I don't have to worry about having an older and smaller Amiga moniter hooked up to play the old games.

My System:

A4000D in Power Tower Case
AmigaOS3.9
PicassoIV
X-Surf II (For DSL connection)
A2091 with GuruROM (for my SCSI burner, Z-II RAM disabled on it)
Sony CDU 924S SCSI burner
56x IDE CD ROM

It's a nice system, but it has a lot of room for expansion and improvement.
4gb HD and a 2gb HD

[alberonn]

AFAIK, the battery just runs the clock when you power down. You can either set the clock youself when your power up or if your Amiga is on the 'net you can use a program like FACTS to set the clock for you.

I have a battery in mine, but my board was supposedly refurbished by Software Hut a few years ago.

My experience with Zorro-II RAM came when I plugged in an 8MB SupraRAM card I had in my old A2000 into the A4000. Sure the memory showed up, but it really bogged my system down bad. It would be nice if I could add some extra RAM without taking such a huge speed hit.

What really made it stand out was watching how slow the buttons were being drawn in on iBrowse when I fired it up. While I need the RAM, it wasn't worth the price I was paying by adding it the way I did. For this reason, I have the RAM on my A2091 disabled. (It's fully populated with a whopping 2MB of RAM. LOL Pity I cannot take advantage of DMA transfers with the board.)

Your SCSI controller looks like it's fully populated with RAM anyway. One thing to keep in mind is that the GVP controllers usually required special GVP SIMMs.

[alberonn]

-8<---

What happends is the system always uses the higher priority RAM, then when all of that is exhausted, it uses the lower priority RAM until all RAM is used up. So unless I use up 128MB of RAM, my system will never suffer from the slower RAM.

-8<---

Well my problem is that I would be touching that 16 bit RAM as I am using up all of my RAM...

I burn though 16MB of Fast RAM easily, especially when I'm surfin' the 'net

[alberonn]

It must be nice to have that much RAM on your system. Even with 16MB of Fast RAM, I'm usually left with under half of that when I boot up. Maybe I got too much stuff running on my system...

It does seem that OS 3.5+ did start to suck lotsa RAM since I remember having more RAM when I was running OS 3.1...

[alberonn]

Let's see, 10 HD partitions, that could be partly responsible, I have Miami always running with my DSL connection, and several programs in my WBStartup:

     WBStartup-disabled (dir)
  AmiDock                          AmiDock.info
  ASyncWB                          ASyncWB.info
  BenchTrash                       Clock
  Clock.info                       clock1.htm
  clock2.htm                       DefIcons
  DefIcons.info                    DPMSManager
  DPMSManager.info                 Exchange
  Exchange.info                    Facts
  Facts.info                       FontPLPatch
  FontPLPatch.info                 Hellas
  Hellas.info                      KillClick2
  KillClick2.info                  LeftyMouse
  LeftyMouse.info                  MUIPopPatch
  MUIPopPatch.info                 OmniScsiCtrl
  OmniScsiCtrl.info                RAWBInfo
  rawbinfo.info                    setKEYandMENU.info
  setKeyAndMenu.rexx               StartMiami
  StartMiami.info                  TelserMon
  TelserMon.info                   WBStartup-disabled.info

My User-Startup has a buncha assigns, ect. And I'm running a PIV 800x600 16 bit screenmode with a full-color JPEG backdrop.

Yup, I think I probally have way too much drek runnin'... LOL