If you had the choice: Blizzard or TekMagic

[ThunderStorm81]

Hi there everyone,

as some guys here know already, I'm new to Amigas and building up an A2000. Now the question is, what accelerator is the best? What's your experience?

I heard the TekMagic 68060/50MHz should be the fastest, but the Blizzard 68060/50MHz should be easier to handle with.

What do you think?

 

[tokyoracer]

Phase 5's Blizzard, no question.

 

[keropi]

phase5 !!!!!!!!

 

[Buzzfuzz]

Phase 5 Blizzard 2060 FTW

 

[arnljot]

Blizzard if I had time to wait for one to come around, TekMagic if I was in a hurry. I would sell the TekMagic later.

 

[AndyLandy]

Hi there everyone,

as some guys here know already, I'm new to Amigas and building up an A2000. Now the question is, what accelerator is the best? What's your experience?

I heard the TekMagic 68060/50MHz should be the fastest, but the Blizzard 68060/50MHz should be easier to handle with.

What do you think?

If you can find one, the DKB Wildfire is the best of the best, but they're like rocking horse poo. Failing that, the Phase5 Blizzard is a darn good choice. That all said, I doubt you'd be disappointed with the TekMagic.

 

[Tajmaster]

Phase5 stuff always seems to be really well made, you tend to find it doesnt have weird quirks. Ive always had Phase5 stuff with the exception of an Apollo 1240/28 back in the day before I went PPC. Darn I wish I hadnt sold it :roll:

 

[Damion]

I know I'm a little late to the party, but thought I'd pitch my 2c in the event anyone else had the same question and found this thread in the future.

I heard the TekMagic 68060/50MHz should be the fastest, but the Blizzard 68060/50MHz should be easier to handle with.

This about sums it up. The TekMagic does perform better - around 10 MB/sec quicker memory performance (!) and slightly faster SCSI. However, the Blizzard came with higher quality software (plus the nice aftermarket tool BlizKick) which initially makes it much less hassle to get going. The TekMagic has an annoying automount bug in its SCSI driver that isn't easily rectified, and might be picky WRT to motherboard revision.

It should also be noted that the TekMagic was designed by Jeff Boyer, former Commodore engineer who worked on the A3000.

Personally, I wouldn't pass on either one. Most of the TekMagic's shortcomings are rectified with a little added effort. But, as AndyLandy pointed out, the Wildfire is the real King of the trio. Good luck finding one, though.

 

[Zetr0]

Blizzard - why?

has better SCSI that uses filesystems stored on RDB's (like SFS or PFS) - the Tekmagic forces only 4GB partitions via FFS which it reads from KickROM and not the Harddisk RDB. of course you could make some custom roms that have a patched FFS - but thats a damn site awkward to Blizzards wonderfull implementation of DMA'd Fast SCSI-2

Not only that the Blizzard has better better compatability with other cards.

of course.... knowing what I know now, I could kick myself for not buying the WildFire a few years back.... I hummed and ahhhed about it too.... yeah... silly me...

given the option a WildFire would be the choice - it has

an onboard ethernet module (upto 100mbit!!)
64bit interleaved RAM (upto 128MB)
2x PCI bus slots - one specifically for the inferno RTG graphics card!

man... I still awe at this card, it truly is a beauty of a device! - mind you I do say that a lot about DKB products!

 

[quarkx]

Blizzard - why?

has better SCSI that uses filesystems stored on RDB's (like SFS or PFS) - the Tekmagic forces only 4GB partitions via FFS which it reads from KickROM and not the Harddisk RDB. of course you could make some custom roms that have a patched FFS - but thats a damn site awkward to Blizzards wonderfull implementation of DMA'd Fast SCSI-2

Not only that the Blizzard has better better compatability with other cards.

of course.... knowing what I know now, I could kick myself for not buying the WildFire a few years back.... I hummed and ahhhed about it too.... yeah... silly me...

given the option a WildFire would be the choice - it has

an onboard ethernet module (upto 100mbit!!)
64bit interleaved RAM (upto 128MB)
2x PCI bus slots - one specifically for the inferno RTG graphics card!

man... I still awe at this card, it truly is a beauty of a device! - mind you I do say that a lot about DKB products!

@ Zetro and others
Please forgive my Naivitivity and I am not trying to troll,
But why in the world, in this day and age would anyone care about Scsi?
I, myself would give up every Scsi card and Device that I own, if I could find a full length IDE card for my "Big Box" Amigas. In fact, If I were design a new card in this day and age, I would make it an 8 meg Zorro 2 card with a CF card holder right on the card and 1 IDE port (to give an "external" CF or SD card reader and at least 2 SATA ports.
My point is in this day and age, there are stock piles of IDE devices kicking around (I myself have probably 15-20 CD rom drives and dozens of hard drives) but now, the SCSI devices are so few and bring outragous price tags with them (ever look at what people are asking for SCSI CD-rom drives?).
I am not sure what its like over there in the UK, but here in North America, SCSI usually means high end server devices, and people try to flog them off as made of gold.
IDE stuff can be found at every shop here, all over town for reasonable (dirt cheap compared to SCSI), and its new with some kind of warranty.
A quick search on Ebay.ca shows for example SCSI DVD roms drives anywhere from $10-$1000. Thats just plain insane.

 

[arnljot]

SCSI on the smaller Amigas are preferable to the internal IDE.

But since the original poster is asking for a card for the A2000, I'd be inclined to say that the SCSI is a bonus, and the better SCSI which will take file-system off the RDB is a proper controller.

And for what to put on those SCSI ports? SCSI to IDE converters! LOL.

 

[AndyLandy]

Blizzard - why?

has better SCSI that uses filesystems stored on RDB's (like SFS or PFS) - the Tekmagic forces only 4GB partitions via FFS which it reads from KickROM and not the Harddisk RDB. of course you could make some custom roms that have a patched FFS - but thats a damn site awkward to Blizzards wonderfull implementation of DMA'd Fast SCSI-2

Not only that the Blizzard has better better compatability with other cards.

of course.... knowing what I know now, I could kick myself for not buying the WildFire a few years back.... I hummed and ahhhed about it too.... yeah... silly me...

given the option a WildFire would be the choice - it has

an onboard ethernet module (upto 100mbit!!)
64bit interleaved RAM (upto 128MB)
2x PCI bus slots - one specifically for the inferno RTG graphics card!

man... I still awe at this card, it truly is a beauty of a device! - mind you I do say that a lot about DKB products!

@ Zetro and others
Please forgive my Naivitivity and I am not trying to troll,
But why in the world, in this day and age would anyone care about Scsi?
I, myself would give up every Scsi card and Device that I own, if I could find a full length IDE card for my "Big Box" Amigas. In fact, If I were design a new card in this day and age, I would make it an 8 meg Zorro 2 card with a CF card holder right on the card and 1 IDE port (to give an "external" CF or SD card reader and at least 2 SATA ports.
My point is in this day and age, there are stock piles of IDE devices kicking around (I myself have probably 15-20 CD rom drives and dozens of hard drives) but now, the SCSI devices are so few and bring outragous price tags with them (ever look at what people are asking for SCSI CD-rom drives?).
I am not sure what its like over there in the UK, but here in North America, SCSI usually means high end server devices, and people try to flog them off as made of gold.
IDE stuff can be found at every shop here, all over town for reasonable (dirt cheap compared to SCSI), and its new with some kind of warranty.
A quick search on Ebay.ca shows for example SCSI DVD roms drives anywhere from $10-$1000. Thats just plain insane.

It's historical. Older computers always had SCSI, hence the A2091 and the A3000. C= like everyone else from that era realised that IDE was cheaper and easier, so for tha A600/A1200/A4000, they used it instead. Apple Macs of the same era did the same thing, older ones had SCSI, newer ones were IDE.

The big difference is that SCSI is handled by its own controller, whereas IDE is cheap and is managed by the CPU. As such, you're losing precious CPU cycles for IDE bus arbitration.

I guess some IDE Zorro cards might have a specific controller, but I'm not sure. The usual solution to the problem is to use a SCSI controller and use SCSI2IDE bridges to use cheap IDE hardware whilst still getting the performance benefits of a SCSI subsystem.

 

[Buzzfuzz]

Well if you put in terms of Blizzard 2060 or Cyberstorm PPC SCSI, these win handsdown on IDE

But don't get it wrong here, in the early days of PC, SCSI was also a hell of lot faster!
It's only since the last 10 years that IDE became faster as it was cheaper and with SATA it became even as fast as SCSI.

So we would benefit more from a CPU card that would make use of normal DDR-RAM and SATA/IDE.

But you'll do fine with a Blizzard 2060, with adapters you could easily use UW 68 pins HDD's or SCA80 pins HDD's

 

[Zetr0]

@quarkx

to be honest its a valid question - I dont see it as trolling.

As Andy has touched on - most SCSI controllers perform DMA opperations - this saves precious CPU time and drastically improves performance accross the board with the Machine.

The only IDE controller that is DMA (that I know of) is the Masoboshi Master Card - its Zorry 2 and only 24bit DMA - however this managed to achieve a sold 1.7MB persec with next to no CPU load on a stock 68000 CPU

As arnljot has pointed the lesser the machine the more of an improvment is noticed as its CPU is free to do meaningfull processing instead of hammering and fetching the IDE bus with its next task.

IDE is CPU intensive - by today's standards with stupidly fast CPU's - unless you are running a backbone data server then IDE PATA (well SATA) is perfectly acceptable - for a bit of a speed boost - use SATA2 Raid - its damn fast and the CPU can take the Hit as it doesn't do that much else with todays graphics cards and other off-load devices.

However... when your machine can only push 65MIPS - you need all the help you can get..

A4000 TestBed -

• 16MB Fast
  2MB Chip
  Kickstart 3.1
  Cyberstorm Mk2 + 128MB RAM
  Cyber SCSI Mk2

Native IDE - 20GB Samsung Spinpoint UDMA IDE
2.6MB per second (55% CPU Usage)

So you see - over half of the work my CPU does is in fetching more work - not actually doing anything or processing it.


CyberSCSI Mk2 - 18.1GB 15k SCSI 3 Hard Disk =
6.2MB per second (23% CPU usage)

as you can see, nearly three times faster and only half the effort - SCSI rox!


Now, lets take say a GVP FastSCSI 2 controller - like the HD8+ for the

A500/A500+ - GVP HD8+ 8MB Fast / 2MB CHIP ( 1 MIP )

GVP HD8+ - HP 10k 4.1GB SCSI Hard Disk (3.6GB partition)
1.67MB per second ( 10% CPU Load)

so the little 68000 moto has more processing time (which it drastically needs!)

lets look at the other way

A1200 + Apollo 030@40 MHz + 32MB RAM (8.5 MIPS)

Naitive IDE - 20GB 2.5" Hitachi Harddisk
1.8MB per second ( 100% CPU Load )


A1200 + Falcon 040@25 MHz + 128MB RAM (18.1 MIPS)
Naitive IDE - 20GB 2.5" Hitachi Harddisk
1.2MB per second ( 90% CPU Load )


As you can see SCSI is very usefull in the Amiga World =)

 

[JLPedro]

Really if you are lucky enough to find one of the above cards, it doesn't matter whitch one.... me thinks.

Now for the vulturing part , if you are unhappy with any of the above please PM me I'LL TAKE IT.

 

[Buzzfuzz]

Really if you are lucky enough to find one of the above cards, it doesn't matter whitch one.... me thinks.

Now for the vulturing part , if you are unhappy with any of the above please PM me I'LL TAKE IT.

Well maybe I'll be able to get a Blizzard 2060, but I'm not going to celebrate yet.

Edit:

CONFIRMED! Blizzard 2060 on it's way, I will show photos here when I have it :wooha:
Oh, it's going to be a good Christmas