Have PPC in A1200. Now add Mediator or G-Rex ??

[Ponos2D]

10 months ago I had also this dilema, Mediator
or G-Rex!
Go for Mediator! Maybe you should try to get
second hand one, if new is to expensive!
New is SX version i think. I have old 4 slot
version and I use 3 slots, so it's enough for me!

Mediator is very qualitative manufactured!
(Uf, I think I wrote this sentence wrong. Did I? :-D)

[Jose]

A nice pro with the mediator is that if it all goes as what they say, you'll latter be able to upgrade your classic Amiga with a G3/G4 processor and run AOS4 on it!

[KennyR]

grexx is dead, that openpci thingy...sure it might become a hit but its VERY unlikely to happen

Openpci is very important! It may allow A1 users to use drivers for PCI cards written for amithlon or MOS. For a start, no-one is going to invest the time in doing certain drivers for A1 (like catweasel), just like nobody did for Pegasos. With openpci, a single driver can cover Amithlon, grex, A1, Pegasos, and Promethius. (But not Mediator, which has been excluded from openpci development for dirty tricks on the part of its designers).

Seriously, if openpci doesn't make it to A1 then OS4 is seriously screwed for any card that hyperion don't support directly. The userbase simply doesn't have the numbers or the talent to churn out drivers, and that goes for any current Amiga solution.

[Jose]

That would be if Open PCI had any driverl... there is almost no driver at all. One the contrary the Mediator has much more drivers, including Terratec soundcards, TV cards, and already sometime ago they announced drivers for MPEG2 hardware decoder.
Then again if OpenPCI makes success,  the Mediator probably won't be supported and you'll be restricted to the drivers supplied by Elbox. Then again IF it goes as planned you'll be able to run AOS4 on it and use it's drivers, so no loss, I don't think OpenPCI has any chance of having  more drivers than AOS4.
To sum up the Mediator has currently more drivers, apparently will have many more in the future, and there is actuall support for the card.  Add to that the possibility of adding a G3/4 processor and  it's defenitly the more flexible option.
Then again, the price of the Mediator is very high, and the performance with the current Amiga accelerators is lower than with the GRex, due to bus constraints when talking to the Amiga motherboard. But it's expected to reach very hight speeds when you add the G3/G4 later cause then it won't depend on transfers to the amiga motherboard. Working like that it will defenitly be the faster one no chance, but only if you use the  PPC processor, using the 68k the GRex will most likely be faster.  
You got to decide yourself depending on what you want, and the pros and cons.

[Effy]

It  seems that I am a little bit convinced about not buying a G-Rex and save money to buy a Mediator. I looked on Ebay last evening, but there was no one for sale 2nd hand ... oh well, I can wait a bit longer I guess ...
But most important of all, a really big thank you to you guys for all this great help !!  :-)

[lempkee]

effy: www.Amibench.com  , here u should be able to find a mediator used..., if not..check again in some days , i know of 2 people wanting to sell their mediator with usb card , u should be able to get it for a fairly good price..

u may even get more cards thrown in at the same time, but then u would have to email me again

cheers

[PulsatingQuasar]

@KennyR

OpenPCI isn't available to most GRex owners either with that screwup they call rev 0 and rev 2 BlizzardPPC. They should have fixed this with another flashROM and not with the pathetic way they are doing it now.

Sure you could send your BlizzardPPC to DCE to get it updated but chances are you will never get it back.

If anyone from Hyperion is reading this; if you wish to use OpenPCI for OS 4 to support the GRex, then think again! The user base is too small because of this rev 0 / rev 2 crap.

[Crumb]

@Jose:
With the G-Rex4000 you should be able to use:
-Terratec soundcards
-BT878/848
-Voodoo3/Voodoo4/voodoo5/Permedia2/SiS
-RTL8029

-With the addition of OpenPCI you should be able to use now:
-RTL8139
-SB Live! (check the last AHI beta)
-Catweasel

-Future OpenPCI drivers include:
-USB
-Terratec (This will be interesting for systems different to the GRex)
-SB128

Don't forget that AROS will use OpenPCI too...
And there's no any reason why OpenPCI can't be used with OS4 too (when it's done)...

[olegil]

@KennyR:

The CatWeasel will most certainly be supported for the AmigaOne. It's already supported by UBoot (at least the keyboard is).

[Acill]

One last thing to remember about the mediator. If you want to use a USB bard do not get the Spider. The stack used with it is no longer being offered by its developer Chris Hodges. Elbox and him do not get along and he will no longer sell keys to Elbox Spider users. Its a shame too, because the Spider it much better then any other available USB card for the Amiga. I just stopped using mine and put in a new ZII card and it works well, but no USB 2.0 speeds.

[Effy]

Lemkee : thanks for the advice to search on Amibench. Never done that before, always sticked to Ebay. As far as testing my computers by replacing the turboboards, still haven't had time. Restarted to work this week after 3 weeks holidays and I'm doing the night shift ....

[KennyR]

You don't get it. OpenPCI itself isn't really a driver - its a wrapper, and redirects to whatever PCI control API runs on the host machine. One driver can be written for any card and immediately used for every kind of the machines I mentioned, even without recompling.

And it is unlikely multidisk.device or lowlevel.library (which use openpci to work on amithlon and pegasos) will be rewritten for A1 alone.