mediator + bliz030 ??

[Galaxyc]

Hello , i have a A1200 with Blizzard III 030/50 and i am thinking of someway upgrading it . I was mainly thinking to buy a mediator pci board but when i have discussed this on the forum they told me that with the 030 i would have to disable the catches of the Blizzard ... Well then that wont be quite an upgrade unless i buy a new accelarator card .. Well anyone has any experience of this matter ? Any advice would be very nice .. :-)

[stopthegop]

Why would you need to disable cpu caches?  Doesn't sound right to me.  I think you can use the mediator with any A1200 regardless of CPU.  The issue of performance is a different matter.  But it should, technically, work.    

[A1200Power]

If you want to know sure i suggest you mail ELBOX for an awnser. They are eager to help, if you have got any questions.

And i doens't sound right by turning off the CPU CACHE.


Greetings Henk

[Lando]

I never had to disable CPU caches with my mediator+Blizz1230?  Maybe someone on the forum was playing a joke.

[Lemmink]

PCI doesn`t make much sense if you dont have at least an 040, better 060 or PPC. A weak 030 doesn`t take much advantag of the possibel speedgains of PCI over Zorro II in an A1200. Price isn`t that much of a point too: While the PCI cards itself are a lot cheaper then Zorro ones you pay much more for a A1200 Mediator then for an old Micronic ZII, or an ACT Z4.

If you allready have ZII and a GFX card for your A1200 there is absolute no point in "upgrading" to PCI unless you plan to dramatically upgrade your CPU-Power as well.

[Karlos]

With respect to caches:

1) There's rarely any reason you'd ever need to disable the instruction cache. Almost all exceptions to this rule relate to self-modifying code.

2) For the data cache, the MMU is generally set up to define which areas of the overall address space of the machine are cacheable. There shoudln't be any need to globally disable the data cache, except for very old or badly written code.

Having to disable caches to use a particular bit of hardware doesn't sound correct at all.

[Boot_WB]

@Lemmink

I have to disagree.
I'm not sure on performance difference between:
Mediator + gfx, ethernet, sound
or
Z2 + graphics, ethernet, sound
with Blizz 1230 mk3.

The price may, or may not be similar (depends on your bargain hunting skills/luck).

BUT - if anything goes wrong with your graphics/sound/ethernet card it is a lot cheaper to replace if you're using mediator.

Also, if the turbocard is upgraded in the future the performance increase will be sigfnificant.

Furthermore, should the PV ever appear that is _supposed_ to support mediator with OS4 (all usual caveats apply when talking about future hardware).  Not sure on the status of supported zorro2 hardware solutions.

In terms of upgrading, if you're going to spend around £100 anyway, the mediator is the obvious way to go.  Plus you could ebay your old zorro2 graphics/bus boards to pay for the upgrade.

PS - Lemmink - congratulations on your "Cult member" 5-star status  :-D

[Galaxyc]

Well i must thank you all for your replies and support . I have also email at elbox and waiting there answer too but as you all sayed there sould not be any problem . ;-)

Edit
I have just received an email from elbox (very fast) and here is what they told me.
 "You do not need to disable anything.The program and data caches of your 030 processor should be switched on when you use PCI cards in Mediator."
So hopefully i will not have any problems at all  :-)  :-D