Buying SAM 460 to replace my PC

[AmigaClassicRule]

SAMs are not Amigas, when will people understand this? Probably never :lol:

Is the new AmigaOne X1000 then an Amiga or it stands the same probability as Sam460? Thanks in advance.

Hey if I upgrade my Amiga 1200 to Apollo 1260 would it break any gaming comapibility or I would have the same gaming experience as the 030 cpu? Off topic here.

[Everblue]

AmigaClassicsRule have you considered the upcoming Arcade FPGA =) - you can put a real 060 on it.

[Duce]

AmigaClassicsRule have you considered the upcoming Arcade FPGA =) - you can put a real 060 on it.

^^ This.  I am eagerly looking forward to the FPGArcade with the add on board, seems the ultimate solution.

AGA Amiga on the FPGArcade itself - check

Ethernet and '060 on the daughterboard - check

Small footprint, low power usage, excellent price compared to Ebaying a bunch of old kit and cobbling together an A1200 - check

Codebase/firmware that will always be worked on and improved - check

[Kremlar]

4) save in my electric bill as I am using 400+watt power supply but the SAM 460 need only 100 watt to run. Saving a lot in heat and energy.

How many watts does a typical Sam460 consume?

[Digiman]

My 90w PSU for my 2.23ghz 64bit Core 2 Duo Inspiron 9400 uses less power than all of those and has HD1200p rez. Not a reason to buy it though!

[danwood]

As for boot times, my Win7 PC boots just as quick as my SAM with OS4.1u4, both running SSDs.

Yeah, since Update 3 OS4.1's boot time has become a lot slower, it's the same as my Windows 7 PC now as well.  Hopefully it'll be restored to how it was pre-update 3 at some point, I could soft reboot in around 3-5 seconds then, more like 25-30 now.

[Hans_]

How many watts does a typical Sam460 consume?

I happen to have my machines hooked up via a power meter, and the Sam460ex consumes approx. 18 Watts when sitting idle in Workbench, 21 Watts when compiling, and 24 Watts when it's running Composite3DDemo. This is with a Radeon HD 4650 graphics card.

Hans

[Kremlar]

Curious, because you can configure some pretty low power PCs.  My i3-2100t HTPCs with 8GB RAM consume around 16w at idle, and bump up to the low 20s when playing back full bitrate BluRays ripped to MKVs.

[Kesa]

It's not an NG Amiga, it's a SAM460 running OS4.

Interesting. I guess we could say something similar about CUSA's C64x and their new "Amiga" line.

[carvedeye]

SAMs are not Amigas, when will people understand this? Probably never :lol:

Really? I have a sam440ep and i was always under the impression that it was a NG amiga or was i mislead?

[Duce]

@ Danwood:

Yeah, boot times have gotten longer, sadly.  I chalk it up to the new AmigaOS 4.1 bootup "splashscreen" that came in u3?,  I think.  It literally is prolonging the boot process time wise by like 75%+.

Anyone know if this can be turned off?  It's a real pain in the ass, the machine sans splashscreen could have been cold booted 3 times with a SSD in the time you sit waiting on the splashscreen, if the splashscreen was optional.  I don't recall seeing any switch options or ways to disable it in the docs, but I could have very well missed something.

[AmigaClassicRule]

If I buy the Apollo 1260 would I be able to run all WHDLOAD games with no problem? Would it effect my gaming compatibility? Thanks in advance.

[Hans_]

Curious, because you can configure some pretty low power PCs.  My i3-2100t HTPCs with 8GB RAM consume around 16w at idle, and bump up to the low 20s when playing back full bitrate BluRays ripped to MKVs.

I think that a fair bit of the power consumption in my case is the graphics card. The PPC460ex processor uses ~6.35W at 1 GHz with DDR2 RAM (according to the datasheet that I looked at), but the Radeon HD 4650 has a TDP of 48W (if you trust wikipedia).

The idle power consumption could probably be trimmed further if power-management was implemented in the RadeonHD driver. As things currently stand, the GPU and VRAM are always run at max clock-speeds and voltages.

EDIT: Likewise, idle power consumption could probably be reduced a bit if unused hardware such as the on-board graphics card could be powered down completely.

Hans

[Tempest]

If I buy the Apollo 1260 would I be able to run all WHDLOAD games with no problem? Would it effect my gaming compatibility? Thanks in advance.

A 68030 card is the most compatible with whdload games, on a 68060 card some games do have slowdown problems with whdload. I owned a Cyberstorm PPC card with 060 and games like Sensible Soccer and Chaos Engine had slowdown problems.

IMHO stick with a 030 card if you mainly play whdload games on your Amiga.

[Hans_]

@ Danwood:

Yeah, boot times have gotten longer, sadly.  I chalk it up to the new AmigaOS 4.1 bootup "splashscreen" that came in u3?,  I think.  It literally is prolonging the boot process time wise by like 75%+.

I highly doubt that the new splash-screen is the cause. AmigaOS 4.x has had a boot screen for ages, and changing the colour of the pixels won't suddenly slow it down. Have you added "run >NIL:" in front of the line that starts up networking? Maybe you used to have that, and forgot to reinsert it after an update. The complete line in my startup-sequence reads:

Run >NIL: NIL: Execute S:Network-Startup

Anyone know if this can be turned off?  It's a real pain in the ass, the machine sans splashscreen could have been cold booted 3 times with a SSD in the time you sit waiting on the splashscreen, if the splashscreen was optional.  I don't recall seeing any switch options or ways to disable it in the docs, but I could have very well missed something.

Like I said above, I doubt that disabling the splash screen will make a difference. Nevertheless, if you dislike it so much, commenting out "MODULE Kickstart/bootimage" in the kicklayout should get rid of it.

Hans

[Tempest]

Really? I have a sam440ep and i was always under the impression that it was a NG amiga or was i mislead?

Yep, it's just an Amiga clone like Aros and MorphOS. IMHO no matter how much money you spend on it, it's still not a real Amiga. 97% of the software available for OS4 is just a mediocre to bad Linux port. Sorry but everything you can run on a 1000+$ Sam440ep runs better on a 50$ x86 running Linux.