Is an A4000T really much better than an A4000?

[Cyberus]

It's just that I was thinking of towering my A4000, but then thought that the amount of time (and perhaps money) it would take, I could just as well spend a couple of months looking out for an A4000T.

Advantages of A4000T:
Already towered, keep original case, onboard SCSI-II header

Disadvantages of A4000T:
More expensive, no additional disk drives (no floppy connector on A4000T?), [others?]

Any other plus/minus points I should be aware of?

It's just as easy to get a mediator for the A4000T is it? Anyone done this - does it fit easily, and well?

[Morley]

Well, the 4000T was the best Amiga money could buy :-) , and the reason i bought one instead of a regular desktop. But it is really a terrible design, you only have 5 5.1/4 external drive bays to put drives into, no internal(!?), and you must use some hard-to-get drive rails to mount any drives there as well. The onboard SCSI is not DMA and on my 4000T it refuses to work with HDD's...

Also the serial and parallell ports, audio/video&RGB ports and the SCSI/floppy ports are mounted on "modules" connected to the MB, with either flat cables or sitting directly on some pin-arrays. Really a troublesome design, as the case is very un-rigid when the cover is off and you risk bending everything out of their connectors :-(

All-in-all, I would say the desktop is a much better designed piece of hardware, but the 4000T is more rare...and the one you would want if you were to collect Amiga's :-D

[NightShade737]

If you wanted to use SCSI you would be better off with a Cyberstorm of some sort...

The A4000T uses Lithium coin batteries by default which is a bonus, but one against is that the mediator for the A4000T has less slots than one for a Towered A4000.

[Crumb]

"The onboard SCSI is not DMA and on my 4000T it refuses to work with HDD's..."

That's very strange, I use hard disks with my A4000T onboard scsi without problems. And it doesn't seem to eat cpu...

"Really a troublesome design,"

I think it's an standard AT formfactor

[zipper]

Original A4000T has nice looks, but my RBM tower can eat almost twice so many drives and atm has 5 free Zorro and 3 free PCI slots waiting for fast Internet connection prices to fall a little.

[PaSha]

The onboard SCSI is not DMA and on my 4000T it refuses to work with HDD's...

The A4000T onboard SCSI is more or less identical to the A4091 SCSI, and is Zorro3 DMA.
Try fiddling with the switches on the back, the label seems to be backwards/up-side-down on mine, so you will want the switches in the opposite position of what the label says...

-Paul

[platon42]

> But it is really a terrible design, you only have 5 5.1/4 external drive bays to put drives into, no internal(!?), and you must use some hard-to-get drive rails to mount any drives there as well.

I dunno what tower you had, but I had no such problems whatsoever. The only issue I had was fitting the Cyberstorm MKI Ram-Module without the 3,5" drive bay colliding. Took me some sawing, but it fit at last.

I am also curious about the drive rails you were speaking about... :-?

> The onboard SCSI is not DMA and on my 4000T it refuses to work with HDD's...

Sorry, now this is really nonsense. The onboard-SCSI NCR controller is onle of the best you can get (for Wide-SCSI2) and of course does DMA with hardly any CPU load. It yielding about 9,8MB/sec here, which is about the maximum you can achieve. Only the Ultrawide SCSI controllers are faster (CS MK3). I never came across a harddisk that didn't work with the controller. I also have a CD ROM, a CD burner and a ZIP drive, connected to it, it works like a charm.

About the module-design: You may like it or not, but serves its purpose. Moreover, the sound quality from the audio/video module is a lot better than that of the A4000D.

Also, the A4000D suffers from really bad motherboard bus performance. The A4000T also comes with a Lithium battery instead of NhCd, so it won't destroy the mainboard with the battery leaking.

I had both, and I never ever would exchange my A4000T by the A4000D I had before. Getting to the CPU card is a pain on the A4000D. All so tight, no room for cables or air circulation. As about the "better designed piece of hardware", ask Dave Haynie it. The A4000D was a cost-reduced prototype going into production when it never should have...

But yes, A4000Ts are very rare...

[Lemmink]

The onboard SCSI is not DMA and on my 4000T it refuses to work with HDD's...

Hoooo, of course the onboard SCSI has DMA, it is nothing more then an onboard A4091, even a little bit better as it does not have to go through the buster. It`s right that the controller is a little less tolerant when the termination and totalcablelenghts are not 100% right (same goes for the A4091).
The A4000T is a nice look haveing it on or beside your desk, but it is a {bleep} to mount anything in it. First you remove the hood to the side, as it is designed like a desktop that stand upright. so even opening the case requires you to disconnect every external cord and pull it to a free space wher you put it on the side.
Next is the drivebridge that goes across the mainboard. You have to remove this bridge in order to mount the CPU-card.
There are not much drivebays, it just 4 5.25", as the floppy occupies one 5.25" in an adapterbracket. Internal you can only fit one HD on the drivebridge (two if you have the correct spacerplates).
I fixed two HDs on top of the PSU using some tape, as there is so little place.
Another down is that you only have 5 Zorroslots, als most towersolutions for the A4000D have more (although you can only use the first 5 for ZIII cards according to commodorespecification you will hardly find 5 ZIII cards you can stick in a machine at one time)

Now to the pros:
- No fiddling with putting an A4000D and zorroextender in a tower.
- no contactproblems with zorrodautherboards as all Zorroslots are onboard
- You can configure the onboard SCSI via DIP-swithes on the back of the machine without opening it
- No contactproblems with Chip-RAM as it is soldered to the board (could be a donwnside too, as a dead Chip-RAM would mean a dead board)
- If the PSU dies just grab a cheap AT-PSU from the trashheap (A4000T Board has standard P8/P9 connectors, so no custom PSU)
- Looks more original then a butchered together A4000D in a tower.
- will theoretically live longers as they are the last boards produced (as long as you dont get one of the about 300 rare A4000T made by Commodore.)

[MAD]

Hoya!

Well, I guess an A4KT is every Amigan's dream (unless they got one already, that it...).
It is mine anyway...

I want a beefed up A4K!!!

Be funky

M A D

[Acill]

If you have the money to spend you can make a desktop version look much nicer and much more usefull then the real tower. I loved my Mirage tower. It had so much space in it, with the Mediator I gained more slots then even a real A3000T had. It was compatable, and just looked sharp. The A4000 versions of some tower kits are just as nice, even better in most cases. If it was me doing it all over again I would build one up the same as before.

[Brian]

Not standing out much from the crowd when I say that I think the A4000D in a tower (specially made for it such as the Mirage4000) is just as sharp as the original A4000T.

Pros and cons way in favour of the desctop in the end I think but then I am a bit based as I've never owned a real A4000T (just seen a few) but have owned several towered A4000D's.

[puppy]

what is worst is the iron heavy case, and it makes fit bad the cards plugged to a mediator board (i.e.: input/output conectors, you can't reach them)

the 32 x 32 cms. board can be put on a server case i.e. Thermaltake Xaser, but would be useful to modify the back to make cards be suitable.

[Morley]

/me hides from the critics....

Sorry, I thought the onboard SCSI wasn't DMA, it was just my wild guess as i didn't find any info on it anywhere...
Regarding the SCSI hdd problem I think it's related to my computer, and of course not other 4000T's.

As goes for the capacity to put in a lot of drives, it it bad...you only have 5 external bays to use as drive bays for internal and external drives, and you have to find drive-rails to mount them on(only 2 included as standard). Anybody who has seen an A4000T knows what I mean.

Anyway, the board is AT form-factor so you can throw it in any case case you like...the 4000T biggest drawback is IMHO the case.

But, nevertheless, I love my 4000T and am glad i got it :-)


-EDIT-

Oh, so I can mount 3.5" drives on the internal "drive-rail"..Uh-oh, my 4000T hasn't got it. One of the drawbacks of buying second(10th)hand equipment :pissed:

[Orjan]

I bought a A4000T case ( not the computer, just the case ) from vesalia.de some time ago and it included drive rails for all of the bays... Perhaps they have just the rails for sale, if anyone needs them?