Best accelerator for the A500, CPU mounted?

[Karlos]

I would have said the Progressive Peripherals PP40-500 was the best, at least in raw performance terms

Fear it...

[Karlos]

Another look:
http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/progressive540

Imagine the rush that would have given you back in 1992, eh?

[Karlos]

Just for the hell of it, I wonder if anybody has ever considered the sidecar->zorro II mod and then shoved a Blizzard 2060 fitted with a 150MHz 603 PPC prototype board in there?

That would be one hardcore A500, though I suspect a tower case may be called for

[Karlos]

That board rocks. Much better than the ICD AdSpeed chip I might add too.

But yeah, I sort of always forget about the 040 cards that were available. What's the availability on something like that? Bet when you did accidentally find one, they'd be pretty cost prohibitive. Also, the heat exchange with 'em in an A500 case can't be all that great. I wonder what the reliability factor was like with 'em.

Oh, I can well remember an Amiga Shopper review of A500 cards that included the 33MHz version back in 1992. IIRC it was around 1000 UKP when it appeared. Pretty much out of the question unless you already had a lot of A500 hardware and didn't want to replace it all with a new machine. The performance, however, was absolutely blistering, easily outpacing every other board by a wide margin.

Reliability wise, I can't say but I do know you had to have KS2.04 at least (there was a socket on the card for it I think) as OS 1.2/3 wasn't compatible.

[Karlos]

a very lame board when you consider it only takes 8 mb ram. (and likely into Z2 space so blocking all other expansion !) I'ld take the viper/e-matrix 530 any day.:afro:

Actually, I don't think it was in the Z2 space. I agree that it would have been nicer if it had a SIMM socket but you can't have everything. 8MB is lame in hindsight but in 1992 that was a fair enough wedge for most users.