Blizzard 2060 & TekMagic 060?

[dannyp1]

I am starting to plan an A2000 Bomac Tower project.  If I had to choose between a Phase 5 Blizzard 2060 and a GVP TekMagic 060 which would be the better accelerator.  I read that the Blizzard has faster SCSI and that's about all I know.  Are there many differences between the two?  Which of the two boards would be my best choice and why?  Thanks,   Dan

[darksun9210]

Phase5 Blizzard 2060:-
50Mhz 060
4x 72pin simm slots for 128Mb ram
fast scsi2
ability to take PPC dev board

GVP Tekmagic
50Mhz 060
4x 64pin and 4x 72 pin for 128Mb ram
fast scsi2

DKB Wildfire
50Mhz 060
4x 72 pin sim slots for 128Mb ram
fast scsi2
10Mb ethernet (the only DMA capable ethernet on the amiga)
2x custom PCI slots
1 custom PCI expansion, the DKB Inferno (basicly a PicassoIV graphics card)

i'd go for the Wildfire if i could,
otherwise there isn't anything really between the GVP and Phase5 boards that seperates the two. both are good boards. both do the same thing with the same capabilities.
if i had both and had to choose one, i'd be a phase5 whore and go for the blizzard. if i was in the market for an 060 card, i'd take what i could get ;-)

[zipper]

TekMagic has just the 060 library to handle the missing fpu instructions when Blizzard has Cyberpatcher + lib. Makes a vast speed difference if fpu is used. Well, you always can find Oxypatcher to make things even.

[dannyp1]

I would consider the Wildfire if I could find one.  I thought I had the inside track on one recently but it ended up I didn't.  Someone else got it.  It never really came down to money as money was never discussed.  It would be kind of like buying the Detroit Tigers.  You can't put a price on something that is priceless.  The seller just has to name his price and either you pay it or you don't.  I have heard that there are driver & library issues with the Wildfire because of it's rarity and lack of support.  I read it elsewhere online but I don't know how true it is.

[Robert17]

I would choose the Blizzard 2060 over GVP Tekmagic, because the tekmagic scsi controller will only work with FastFileSystem (Though you can use other filesystems after boot) Also I've found the Blizzard to be more friendly with other expansion cards, and a lot less fussy about which revision motherboard it's fitted in.

Getting hold of a wildfire is next to impossible!

Robert

[Damion]

@dannyp1

Actually, I get *much* faster results with the TekMagic SCSI, compared to the Blizzard on amigaresource (even using FFS). I can post them later for your comparison. Technically, I would guess the SCSI should perform similar on both... same SCSI chip and all.

The TekMagic also returns slightly better AIBB numbers. (Trivial difference, though.)
 
The big disadvantage with the TekMagic is the SCSI controller won't automount SFS or PFS3 partitions, it only looks for filesystems in ROM and ignores the RDB. However, it does work fine with SFS in ROM.

@zipper

I tested the p5 libs and cyberpatcher, and they seem to work just fine on the TekMagic. Normally I use mmulib, muredox if needed... muredox is kind of interesting because it can show you which, if any, instructions were patched after running a program.

[nishtek]

Whichever is available.  we have a TekMagic 060 coming up for sale in a week or so. (doing tests on it now). :-D

[Damion]

-double post-

[Damion]

SysSpeed drive benchmark:

TekMagic/Blizzard, 50MHz, FFS

Create: 844/116 op/s
Open: 502/599
DirScan: 1080/2365
Delete: 2394/1194
Seek/Read: 5238/2899
CreateFile: 4.82/2.30 mB/s
WriteFile: 5.76/2.90
ReadFile: 8.71/4.24
RawRead: 9.31/6.91

The only faster SCSI on amigaresource.cx is the CSMKIII/PPC. However, I'm thinking most of the benchmarks submitted were either from old drives, or drives not configured correctly, since my guess is that the controllers (53C710) should perform similarly with the same setup.

Memory benchmarks also favor the TekMagic, it falls roughly between the CS MKII and MKIII.

However - a big plus for the Blizzard is the ability to use Blizkick. That, and the lack of the SCSI bug makes it far less hassle to set up IMO. To get the same funtionality with the Tek, you've got to burn a custom ROM.