A1200 Accelerator Prices

[alexatkin]

I was wondering what is the average price for A1200 second-hand accelerators?

Mainly id just like to throw some Fast RAM into my A1200 but it seems there isnt much choice but to get an accelerator in order to do that.  Obviously it doesnt hurt to crank up the CPU as well but I REALLY do not want to spent £100 on upgrading my A1200 as im never gonna get the same use out of that as £100 worth of Xbox 360 games.  :-D  

Also,, I have tons of old 72pin SIMMS lying around from old PCs so a RAM only upgrade would be very cost effective.  Theres a possibility I can also rip an old motorola CPU from an old Mac (if they are sockted) for free so if I had a cheapo card with a missing CPU. So again it seems crazy to spend much money on upgrading my A1200. Hell, I can run WinUAE FAR faster than I can upgrade the A1200 up to but im a purist and want the "real thing" if I can get it.

Anyway, with the risk of someone with more money beating me to it - theres the following on eBay at the moment and I wondered what the people here would consider a reasonable price for them.

DCE TYPHOON MKII 68030@40MHz 16MB AMIGA 1200

Sounds decent but "reserve not met" and they expect £35 for the following:

APOLLO 1220 TURBO 68020@25MHz 4MB AMIGA 1200

Well, 4MB MAX upgrade seems rather pointless, I fancy at least 10MB and considering I have 32MB EDO DIMMS going spare it would be nice to use one, BOTH if possible. This way I can consider upgrading the kickstart and OS3.9.

This is why I never upgraded the A1200 before, it just doesnt seem worth the price.  Im happily using my PC for everything now so the Amiga is just a hobby.  If im gonna spend £40 I tend to side with getting an Xbox 360 game unless the accelerator is going to be as entertaining which seems doubtful.  Im not trying to PowerPC or anything too fancy, just enough RAM to play around such as upping Workbench to 256 colours without running out of memory.

[Lemmink]

Here are some price approximations (based on what they go for in germany, in the UK and especially in the US you will have to pay more for it):

Blizzard 1220 28 MHz with 4 MB 20-30 EUR
Blizzard 1230 50 MHz IV 50-80 EUR
Blizzard 1240 25 MHz 100-120 EUR
Blizzard 1260 50 MHz 180-250 EUR

M-Tec EC030 28 MHz max 8 MB 30-50 EUR
Ram-only expansion with RTC (various) about 10-20 EUR

The Typhoon will probably got for over 50 EUR
The Apollo 1220 seems a little overpriced for me. 20-30 EUR would be OK.

[alexatkin]

Well its funny you should mention the Apollo being overpriced as I offered £20 (~30 EUR) for it and they declined.  Stupidly it doesnt even let me make a second offer, although I cant see a point in 4MB RAM anyway - anything less than about 16MB seems pointless.

Id possibly pay 80 EUR for a Blizzard 1230 50 MHz if someone offered although I was thinking around 60 EUR MAX including shipping.  Its amazing they are still worth so much when even the highest is fairly slow by todays standards.  Then again, Workbench being so darn fast I bet they FEEL damn speedy.  Even when I went to Linux I was thinking "damn, if only AmiWM had been kept up-to-date" because Workbench was such a perfect compromise between complexity and speed.  Windows just seems to get more and more bloated (Vista looks aweful) no wonder MacOS is still so popular but that is the other side (until OS X which kinda fixed that being BSD and all) where it doesnt give you ENOUGH control.

[Lemmink]

Well its funny you should mention the Apollo being overpriced as I offered £20 (~30 EUR) for it and they declined. Stupidly it doesnt even let me make a second offer

Well only because I think it is overpriced doesn`t mean the rest of the world, especially the seller, has to agree with it ;-) . There is allways someone, clueless, desperate or wealthy enought to pay more then the common price.

although I cant see a point in 4MB RAM anyway - anything less than about 16MB seems pointless.

All RAM-only cards, 020 cards and some of the cheaper 030 cards are limited to 8 MB maximum, because that is the amount of Fast-RAM a bare A1200 can adress by itself. For more RAM there is some logic needed on the acceleratorcard. The cheaper ones lack this for cost reasons.
Higher price accelerators like the better 030 and all 040/060 can handle either 32/64 (Apollos with one/two RAM-sockets) or 128 MB (Blizzards)

[alexatkin]

So how does the DCE TYPHOON MKII 68030@40MHz compare to the Blizzard 1230IV 68030@50Mhz?  I presume there must be some key differences but are they significant for the difference in price?  

From what you said the Blizzard is better and in this particular case is 10Mhz faster too.  But from a cost point of view, if the Typhoon is cheaper (cant tell as its reserve not met), is it worth getting or would you recommend paying a bit more for the Blizzard?  

I cant imagine needing 128MB of RAM on my A1200, 8MB would probably do but if im going to be spending significant money anyway I might as well go for acceleration.  Besides, its only accelerators I can find on eBay and at least web browsing with the Amiga would be plausable (not that even that is essential to me) that way.

Again, its a tricky business when its just my love for the AmigaOS that is pushing me to upgrade at all.  I just got a keyboard adapter so I wont have to ditch the A1200 when I get the steering wheel for the 360 (which will have to sit under the TV where the A1200 is currently).  Perhaps I will even tower the A1200 but it always sounded too complicated or expensive to be worthwhile.

[alexatkin]

Okay I got the Blizzard 1230 50 MHz IV with 128MB RAM.  It finished at £53 inc shipping (78.31 EUROS).  

I figured it was well worth it as I have never seen SIMMS over 32MB (I wasnt even aware they existed) so im betting they are quite rare aka expensive.  This should give me plenty of leeway for AmiTCP to work more smoothly and pretty up my workbench a little bit without running out of memory.

I also got an Eyetec PC keyboard adapter so im going to perhaps looking into putting the A1200 into a tower or desktop case.  I always figured it was more trouble than its worth but it might just be the kind of hobby I need right now.