expansion or accelerator

[swift240]

A friend of mine has got himself a Mediator and Tower system he has put the 1200 inside so far so good he got himself a Voodoo 5 and soundblaster128, i installed OS3.9 for him using my temp accelerator.
He cant afford an accelerator right now because of the money he has had to put for this little lot.

so question?

1.  can he use an expansion board 8 meg ram with 40Mhz FPU
2.  is it worth his while using one until he gets hold of an accelerator.

I have told him he the Amiga will take up about 6 meg of fastram for a start (I may be wrong, but thats about right for my setup)  I am left with 25,833,040 meg of fastram after it has all loaded up. from a total of 32 meg.

I can understand him wanting to see it up and running, I have put my accelerator in his just to show him it is all set up in the correct way, but I have no idea what 8 meg will leave him with.

Has any one experiance of this please.

(realy he needs to wait for a accelerator but thats only my opinion)

TIA,

Mike....

[Brian]

As OS3.9 requier fastram he deffinitly need some expansion. 4Mb fastram is eaten up just like that but 8Mb should keep him going till he get himself a real turboboard. A good thing is that he have the Voodoo card... that way there should be more chipmem over for other things.

[Lemmink]

With just a fast-RAM expansion there is no point in haveing a GFX and soundcard at all. All applications that make use of it require serious computingpower. Even a 030 @ 50 MHz would be hurtingly slow if you run a 1024 resolution (the high refreshrate of the voodoo is worth nothing if the CPU can`t provide the data that should be displayed at a decent rate) AHI eats up quite some power too.
Anything less then a 030 and he will stop using the machine in a few days complaining everything was faster with AGA and paula (and he is right about that).

[swift240]

I am looking on eBay at the moment for him to see whats available.

I did tell him its better to wait.
I use an 030 at 40Mhz and its not to bad, could be better but its better than an 8 meg expansion thats for sure.
Since he has seen my 030 inside his Tower he loves the display but he aint gona keep it thats for sure so I got it back now.


Mike....

[Doobrey]

swift240 wrote:
1.  can he use an expansion board 8 meg ram with 40Mhz FPU
2.  is it worth his while using one until he gets hold of an accelerator.

 AFAIK, using an 8Mb memory board would stop the Mediator working (or the mediator would stop the ram working..depending on what gets initialised first), since there`s only 8Mb of Zorro II memory space :-(

{edit}
 Also, some of those memory cards aren`t autoconfig, and will take up that space no matter what the Amiga says.
{/edit}