Thinkink Of Getting The New GVP-M 4060T

[amiga1084]

Hello All,

I'm thinking of buying the new GVP-M 4060T from Software Hut to replace my current Warp Engine in my second A4000T. Just a few questions is it a good board as I have heard some horror story's that the on board SCSI controller is rubbish? Also would the board be much faster than my current 040-40 Mhz Warp Engine? I like the idea of buying new hardware than taking a chance on Ebay. I might buy two one as a spare.

I would like to hear your comments on the subject,

Thanks in advance,
Merv Stent

[the_leander]

Hello All,

I'm thinking of buying the new GVP-M 4060T from Software Hut to replace my current Warp Engine in my second A4000T. Just a few questions is it a good board as I have heard some horror story's that the on board SCSI controller is rubbish? Also would the board be much faster than my current 040-40 Mhz Warp Engine? I like the idea of buying new hardware than taking a chance on Ebay. I might buy two one as a spare.

I would like to hear your comments on the subject,

Thanks in advance,
Merv Stent

Don't know about the SCSI, I've heard both good and bad reports, though fewer bad ones than some of the SCSI addons that shipped with Apollo boards it has to be said (which by all accounts were borderline criminal).

The Warp Engine was by far the best 040 Amiga Accelerator ever produced imho. It had truly astounding performance when it came to memory intensive tasks thanks due to the way it handled ram (iirc it interleaved the accesses to improve performance not unlike dual channel memory controllers on modern PCs).

The 060 will give you far greater performance in processor intensive tasks and in day to day use, but I'm unsure if the 4060 shared the Warp Engines memory tricks. However, even without them you will be getting a much, much faster system out of it overall.

Good luck!

[Colmiga]

The SCSI controller on the A4060DT isn't 'rubbish', it's the same NCR 53c710 chip as the Warp Engine, it's the quirks of the driver for it that's the issue (ie. will only automount and boot FFS formatted partitions, limited to 4GB partitions max without NSDPatch, etc.).

I've managed to get it to create, format and recognize a 30GB partition with OS3.9 and the right NSDPatch line on SCSI which appeared to function, though I hear there may be a possibility data written over the 4GB barrier may get corrupted depending on how the driver was written.

In terms of speedup over a 68040/40MHz CPU a 68060/50MHz will give you a 2-3x speedup, depending on the task. The memory on the A4060DT supports memory interleaving for better performance, though the board can be very picky about what RAM sticks it will work with when this mode is enabled. When I had a A4060DT I managed to find some RAM that would work with interleaving mode and found it gave around twice the memory speed than with it disabled.

I would recommend the A4060DT as an upgrade from the Warp Engine if you can live with the SCSI driver limitations and manage to find RAM that works with interleaving mode. The board is a well built piece of hardware. It also tolerates a certain level of overclocking of the CPU as well.