The Ultimate Amithlon Hardware?

[XDelusion]

Since my Amigas all need work and I'm too broke to afford it all at the moment, I decided to give the latest WinUAE another go for all my OctaMED S.S./MIDI needs.
 Well as I expected UAE still sucks in that department. Sample is triggered in the sequencer, and a second later you hear it. NO GO.
 WinUAE is too slow for my needs anyhow, why settle with a 200 something MIP virtual Amiga when I could have a 1 plus Ghz Amithlon machine? So I quickly dug my candidate PC out of storage, dusted it off, and began to set up Amithlon straight from memory... which led me back to Charlie's Guide once I had everything installed and running. Vesa and No sounds just wasn't doing it for me.

https://app.box.com/shared/hisnu6o4lc

While I was reading Charlie's guide I decided to do a search for an ASUS motherboard that fits the specs that he mentions. My searches led me to the "ASUS A8N32"

http://hothardware.com/Reviews/ASUS-A8N32-SLI-Deluxe--nForce-4-SLI-X16-Unleashed/

 It would appear that this motherboard not only features the nForce4 chipset, but also uses the AC97 codec! Amithlon is supposed to support SATA now, but if not, turn it off in BIOS (maybe required) and run off IDE. The only downside is no AGP, but you can probably get by with a PCI card assuming the hardware will allow it.
 Mind you, I have not tested this mother board, can't afford to atm, but for someone who has spare cash laying around, or perhaps a spare ASUS A8N32, then here's your chance to dive in and maybe end up with one of the best Amithlon hardware set ups that you could ask for.

Another motherboard I noticed is the Gigabyte "GA-K8NS" which would appear to have everything, AGP too!

http://www.gigabyte.us/products/product-page.aspx?pid=2275

[Methanoid]

There are MANY boards that run 100% with Amithlon but arent listed.. I ran some 945 chipset boards and G31 boards with Core2Duos fine.. Why run something old and clunky?

[Duce]

My Amithlon rig uses an A8NSLI mobo and works without issue.  PCI graphics card using the onboard IDE.  Old AMD X2 4200+ CPU.

[XDelusion]

If you guys know of mother boards with better specs that you've tested with Amithlon, by all means feel free to list them, would be interested to have a list.

[rdolores]

I've built 2 Amithlon machines on older PC's, both PIII's.  It's been a while, but with this new info, I will try again with some newer machines.  Thanks for the link.  Amithlon rocks!

[Methanoid]

Look for Milanca's kernel (v4). The old kernels were not "supposed" to work with SATA but worked fine for me with an Intel D945GCLF2. Pretty sure sound and LAN are supported by new drivers and although the onboard VGA gives VESA only you could pop a PCI FX5200 in the slot if you felt the need but FX5200==GMA950 near enough..

[fishy_fiz]

The single best Amithlon mobo Ive encountered is a gigabyte ga-p35-ds3l.
3 pci slots, dual channel ddr-2 1333 support, dma support, supports all core2 (duo and quad) revisions and working sata, and massively overclockable. No need to use kernel4 either, which is handy as it seems to break SetDMA.

Im using one at the moment with a c2d e5300 @ 4.05ghz.
Quite possibly the fastest ever "68k" system

[Iggy]

I'm not sure if all the drivers would be available, but I know where there is a Sun nforce4 based PCI-E/PCI system for sale for under $50 with a 2.2 GHz Opteron processor and shipping is only about $20.

You would probably want to replace the video card and i don't think it has a hard drive (I can probably send you one of those (it uses SATA II drives).

Edit - Correction, there are two, one as stated above and a second for under $51 with free shipping.
They don't have memory or hard drives (but I have both).

Jim

[XDelusion]

Thanks for the links in the PM, how cool is that?!

Maybe I'll grab one in a couple of weeks and give it a spin, I'd love to have a Amithlon Sun machine, and if Amithlon doesn't work, then a Sun Mint box.

I'm not sure if all the drivers would be available, but I know where there is a Sun nforce4 based PCI-E/PCI system for sale for under $50 with a 2.2 GHz Opteron processor and shipping is only about $20.

You would probably want to replace the video card and i don't think it has a hard drive (I can probably send you one of those (it uses SATA II drives).

Edit - Correction, there are two, one as stated above and a second for under $51 with free shipping.
They don't have memory or hard drives (but I have both).

Jim

On a side note, using a FreeDOS loaded USB stick to boot from really comes in handy when you are not dual booting with Windows! I've been wrestling, trying to figure out how to mount my DOS partition inside of Amithlon, but now I don't have to and I can run OpenGEM too!

I think I might re-do my drive and make a 3rd partition to dedicate to DOS games since I've already got a Sound Blaster installed.

[fishy_fiz]

As much as I like my amithlon box (even bought a riser card that works to give me a 4th pci slot), I must admit its probably overkill if you mostly want to run octamed s-s. While increased raw speed does come in handy for audio work it sounds as though the issue youre encountering is more latency of the physical connection related? If this is the case then amithlon will be better than uae regardless of specs.

Oh, and as for mounting dos volumes inside amithlon:

Setconfig dosmount ""

Then soft reboot.

[nicholas]

Make sure to use Ramithlon and SetDMA to get the best performance out of Amithlon.

[XDelusion]

I'll admit, I'm not an Amithlon expert and I've never tinkered with "Setconfig dosmount """, Ramithlon, or DMA settings. Can you guys elaborate some more?

Thanks!


Fish, yes UAE is useless for things such as OctaMED, so overkill is now the name of the game, though I'm sure I'll find plenty more to do with my  box, especially if I get Nova's ZDOOM port working in it...

I'm not sure anyone understands what ZDOOM is, no one's talking about it here, strange.

[fishy_fiz]

Setconfig is just an aos command.
SetDMA is a tool to force DMA (increases transfer rates as well as stopping interrupts from hogging resources unnecessarily.
Ramithlon isnt worth it. Other tools do a better job.

[nicholas]

Setconfig is just an aos command.
SetDMA is a tool to force DMA (increases transfer rates as well as stopping interrupts from hogging resources unnecessarily.
Ramithlon isnt worth it. Other tools do a better job.

Which ones?  I'm planning on setting up a new Amithlon box soon and I only know about Ramithlon.

[nicholas]

I'll admit, I'm not an Amithlon expert and I've never tinkered with "Setconfig dosmount """, Ramithlon, or DMA settings. Can you guys elaborate some more?

Thanks!


Fish, yes UAE is useless for things such as OctaMED, so overkill is now the name of the game, though I'm sure I'll find plenty more to do with my  box, especially if I get Nova's ZDOOM port working in it...

I'm not sure anyone understands what ZDOOM is, no one's talking about it here, strange.

Ramithlon patches the CopyMem routines to use x86 native code instead of emulated 68k code.

I've always found it to provide a big speed increase.