GVP A530 Restoration Project

Next up is to finish the work on the fan and get that attached.

First off, the fan itself. I did a little more work on this to tidy the wires up a bit more :

Attachment 33170

Then I removed the old fan from the case. See how deep the fan is; it takes up precious space inside the casing :

Attachment 33171

After removal, this leaves a nice little collar that has little studs on it to keep the fan in position. These line up perfectly with the new fan :

Attachment 33172

A couple of spots of superglue and the new fan is attached perfectly :

Attachment 33173

The finished work, casing ready to be attached to the main unit :

Attachment 33174

A quick check, and all is working well. I can barely hear the fan, just as it should be :

Attachment 33175

Next up is something Ive been working on for a while; and that is performance.

After reading several forums around the web, the general opinion is that the scsi controllers on some GVP kit isnt the fastest, this is particularly the case with these sidecar units.

Some time ago, after reading about the guru rom chip, I acquired the GVP version of one of these right here in the Sales forum. It came with the adaptor and 2 versions of the actual chip itself; 6.9 and 6.10. Here you can see it together with a generic 4.15 rom, which was burned using the rom image from the babel.de website :

Attachment 33179

For testing, I used six scenarios;

4.15 rom - FFS
4.15 rom - SFS

Guru rom 6.9 - FFS
Guru rom 6.9 - SFS

Guru rom 6.10 - FFS
Guru rom 6.10 - SFS

Checking each one of these setups using SysSpeed, I got exactly the same result every time; that was a transfer rate of around 1Mb/Sec. The 2 versions of the Guru rom made no difference to performance whatsoever.

In general use, it feels quite fast and snappy in any case, but Ive not been able to get any further performance improvement. Still, the existing performance is good enough !

In the end then I went with the generic 4.15 rom; this is obviously lower profile. When fitted, you can also notice how much space there is around the components overall, which aids in keeping the unit cool :

Attachment 33180

Assembly for the final time then; fit the PC286 board in there and shes ready to go :

Attachment 33182

great work here:thumbsup:

i thought the later roms were more stable and gave upto 3.5meg transfer rates?

also the Guru rom gives you access to larger hard drives (I wanna Guru rom, but no one has one:()

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Justin

great work here:thumbsup:

i thought the later roms were more stable and gave upto 3.5meg transfer rates?

also the Guru rom gives you access to larger hard drives (I wanna Guru rom, but no one has one:()

---

Well I was of that thought too.

The changes from 6.10 upwards apparently were very minor and didnt have an effect on performance.

As to the larger hard drive size, I found no difference at all when setting it up. The various partitioning tools still reported incorrect sizes but allowed me to parition it anyway.

I really couldnt see any difference at all from using the guru rom as opposed to the generic 4.15.

There is a 4Gb CF card in there and I still have access to the entire drive. Thats more than enough for the needs I have with this unit. :)

Well here she is; completely reassembled and attached to the 500+ she will be permanently mated to :

Attachment 33191

This pretty much marks the end of this project. From a somewhat miserable looking thing, she is now fully restored, in excellent working order and should be serviceable now for many years to come.

I'm more than happy with the end result here; and we now have another piece of Amiga hardware that has been saved from the effects of time and is back to her original beauty.

I would have been more than happy to have picked up something in this condition even if bought as brand new all those years ago.

Hope you have enjoyed it all folks, any questions or comments, please post away !

:thumbsup:

Edit : I shall be starting on a new restoration project soon; that is the A500+ you see above !

Oops!

One last bit I forgot to add.

As part of the box of bits I got from GVP_SALES, my A530 is now complete with original manuals, setup disks, license card and even the warranty card :

Attachment 33192

:p

Hi, very nice setup!!

Can you do a read test with sysinfo and make a photo of it?
I wonder about the read speed.