Hi all, a bit of advice is what i'm after i guess, or hints and anecdotes of your general expiriences with the above.
i'm toying with the idea of buying a Mediator Board. is this a better solution than hunting ebay or amibay for zorro ethernet and graphics gards? (i would prefer zorro, but that's just me 
Back in 2004 I was in a similar situation and had similar questions. Luckily I decided to walk the Mediator route and up to today I don't regret it.
My A4kPPC is towered in the Micronik BigBox Tower and that came with the Zorro III Busboard. My main OS is OS 3.9 with BBs I&II/WarpOS 16.1 - and that's what the following is referring to.
what's peoples thoughts on this? i always wanted to expand the ol' A4k, and it seems that PCI cards are the way to go these days. plus once i have the mediator, i can probably get hold of the cards themselves pretty cheap (or free).
Well, once I had mine I was lucky that a colleague had an old Voodoo4 lying around and gave it to me for 10€. IIRC, I did buy the Terratec 512i digital in a shop at a small price, as well as the 10/100 mBit NIC (with Mediator supported RTL chip). Initially I had the Spider II with that Version of Poseiden that supported the Mediator/Spider-combination, but exchanged it later with the Deneb in a Zorro III slot for USB 2.0 speed reasons (the Spider isn't really highspeed). Aside from the Spider, I didn't pay more than 40€ for the cards.
i'm just a little bit dubious about their spec claims.
do you need to have a GFX card on the PCI bus to be able to run a network card?
Yes.
A part of the graphic mem is used for buffering, afaik.
Furthermore the graphics card acts as PCI busmaster, IIRC.
And a gfx card is much more eye-friendly than the native Amiga graphic modes.
264MB/s they claim is the max bandwidth between cards and/or host at 66Mhz *on the same bus*. and even this is unlikely. also the host in this case is the PCI/Zorro bridge chippery.
what are the real world speeds i can expect? will i even approach 10MB/s host to zorro to pci bridge to pci card?
i remember bustest would get 14MB/s max from a CV64/3D - so should i be pretty suspect of any claims above, say 20MB/s?
I have never done any bus speed tests and so cannot come up with numerical figures.
Possibly the NIC dosn't work with the full 100 mBit - perhaps it achieves just 80 mBit.
But in any case the speed is significantly faster compared to a 10 mBit net access on an x86.
Spider II USB 2.0 "highspeed" wasn't really highspeed. O.K. - it was a bit faster that USB 1.1 on an x86, but copying large files took ages and sometimes was unreliable (several unpluggings and repluggings of the USB device were necessary to get the job done). Therefor I bought a Deneb when it appeared and now USB 2.0 is much faster on the A4kPPC.
if i fully load the mediator with GFX card, NIC card, sound card, and USB card, will it choke?
I have never noticed such behaviour.
But I cannot recommend a PCI-USB card. The newer versions of Poseidon do no longer provide support for Mediator based USB cards.
Take my advice and go the Deneb route (if you have a Z III or higher daughterboard) - this way USB on classic Amiga is fun. Deneb also is said to work in Z II, but just in PIO mode and not in DMA mode as it does with Z III. PIO is slower than DMA.
And be aware that a Buster Rev.9 is said to be faulty. I had been told it can possibly cause problem with Z III boards - and so I exchanged it with a Rev.11 Buster before I fitted it all in the tower.
whats the driver situation like? crashy? stable?
My Mediatior came with the MM CD (Multi Media CD). It provides all the drivers. Make sure to have the latest versions - if necessary, download the latest versions. My setup works stable since day one (back in 2004) and I'm really fully satisfied.
Some talk bad about the Mediator board (e.g. the OS4 devs) - but here it has always done what it is supposed to and so I'm completely happy with the mediator.
anybody know what the deal is with "version 2" advertised on elbox's website?
Hmmm - I could not spot a "version 2" anywhere. Can it be you misread "Mediator Multimedia CD UP 2.0" as "Mediator 2.0"?
sorry for all the questions, but being the price they are, and the fact i know nothing whatsoever about them, thought this would be the place to ask 
It is always a good idea to be informed before buying...
