What advantages can I expect with a BigRamPlus on my A4000 ?

[dougal]

I just bought a 256mb BigRamPlus ZIII card for my A4000D.

Currently the setup on the A4000D is:

A3640 clocked at 33Mhz (Full with MMU & FPU)
16MB Fast ram on the motherboard
IDE HDD + IDE CD-RW
1.76MB HD disk drive
(Soon to arrive) Picasso II
Running OS3.9

I don't use the Amiga for any productivity at all, I just like using WhdLoad for games/demos and like looking at the specs/performance in AIBB and SYSInfo etc.. And of course I love using the OS and making it look pretty Some of you guys may say that my A4000 setup is a waste for what I use it for especially since I have an A1200 equipped with a Blizzard IV but I dont care, I love it and have always loved big box (well any type really) Amigas.

But with the extra 256MB ram (especially being ZIII based rather than mobo ram), should I expect an increase in general performance ?

 

[roy_bates]

simple answer,no.


your only using it for whdload as youve said,so dont expect it to be faster youll just have more memory available to the system.

 

[dougal]

simple answer,no.


your only using it for whdload as youve said,so dont expect it to be faster youll just have more memory available to the system.

What about all the other general stuff, like the actual OS itself or diagnosis apps like Sysinfo, or even perhaps ADoom ? I also want to toy around with a MacOS emulator.

 

[roy_bates]

simple answer,no.


your only using it for whdload as youve said,so dont expect it to be faster youll just have more memory available to the system.

What about all the other general stuff, like the actual OS itself or diagnosis apps like Sysinfo, or even perhaps ADoom ? I also want to toy around with a MacOS emulator.

the answer would still be no,your only adding more memory.

what was you expecting bud performance wise?

 

[dougal]

Well, at the very least I expected that the general experience of OS3.9 may be faster. Don't know, but like when I shoved a 1MB expansion into my A600 taking it up to 2MB chipram it made a slight difference in speed with regards to using Workbench and iirc even hd access.

 

[fitzsteve]

As Roy says it does not give any noticeable performance increase, you would need an accelerator with local fast ram.

That being said, you could run stuff from ram and use ram disk, that is faster for general read/write operations.

 

[roy_bates]

Well, at the very least I expected that the general experience of OS3.9 may be faster. Don't know, but like when I shoved a 1MB expansion into my A600 taking it up to 2MB chipram it made a slight difference in speed with regards to using Workbench and iirc even hd access.

sorry bud,the answer would be no to speed increases.
the only way youll get a performance speedup is putting fastram on to an accelerator card.

youll find,when your picasso turns up.thats when workbench comes alive in 3.9 and youll free up chipram.
you will notice it refreshing the screen noticeably faster.becuase it wont be using chipram.or the custom chips to draw on screen
even then you wont be seeing anything special in sysinfo speed wise.

you might even find that you wont need the extra fastram in your system,specially when you consider what your using the machine for

 

[fitzsteve]

Yeah rtg makes a massive difference to workbench.

 

[Xanxi]

A lot of RAM is always good for Shapeshifter, as you say you want to toy with Mac emulators. It is also very useful for PCTask.

 

[alexh]

Surely a better investment would be one of the new 040 to 060 adapter boards and an MC68060RC50 chip? Or perhaps speed geek's A3640 state machine mod which greatly improves bus utilisation? Or both?

 

[fitzsteve]

There's really no substitute for an Accelerator with Local fast Ram, I've played around with a Quad Doubler in the past and whilst it improves CPU operations the system is still held back by the Motherboard/Zorro 3 Ram. My A4000 with Quad Doubler that turned my A3640 into a 50mhz 040 was significantly slower than it is with a WarpEngine which is 040 @40mhz.

 

[dougal]

Too late though. Unless I find a super bargain accelerator (car boot sale or charity shop) like a Warp Engine or Cyberstorm i'm stuck with the A3640.

Is this 50mhz mod hard to do ? I'm not good at soldering and wont trust my "skills" on an expensive A3640. Maybe someone can do it for me ?

 

[fitzsteve]

It wont make a lot of difference to most tasks, only CPU intensive stuff like working with archives or emulation.

The hardware (quaddoubler) is very rare anyway and would cost you as much if not more than a proper accelerator so in the long term would not be worth it.

The 060 adapter is an interesting one though, it would need you to burn a custom rom if you use a full 060 CPU, or you can use a EC060 but these have no FPU and many applications you might use that take advantage of the extra speed (think 060 demos) will need that FPU.

The adapters are quite cheap, you would need to get it built up if you don't have the soldering skills: https://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?64890-Amiga-WarpEngine-68040-68060-adapter

https://www.amibay.com/showthread.p...e)-COMPLETE-KIT-4TH-BATCH-(FINAL-BATCH)/page3

 

[dougal]

Yeah I saw that and it looks cool. I'd have to get a friend to do the soldering work I guess. Would also have to look for a CPU.

I think my best option is to wait it out until I find a nice 040 or 060 accelerator. I'm in no big rush and as is especially once the Picasso II arrives its a pretty fast machine.

It wont make a lot of difference to most tasks, only CPU intensive stuff like working with archives or emulation.

The hardware is very rare anyway and would cost you as much if not more than a proper accelerator so in the long term would not be worth it.

The 060 adapter is an interesting one though, it would need you to burn a custom rom if you use a full 060 CPU, or you can use a EC060 but these have no FPU and many applications you might use that take advantage of the extra speed (think 060 demos) will need that FPU.

The adapters are quite cheap, you would need to get it built up if you don't have the soldering skills: https://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?64890-Amiga-WarpEngine-68040-68060-adapter

 

[fitzsteve]

Once you get RTG I'm sure you'll be satisfied with the speed

Just don't expect to be playing Quake on it and you'll be happy.

Shapeshifter runs exceptionally well on an 040 with RTG, even an A3640 and will benefit from your extra Ram.

- - - Updated - - -

Here mate, these Video's will give you an idea of what to expect if you did update:

This is the 50mhz A3640, note the Icon speed is mostly down to low screen colours (16 colours) and Icon Library. You can begin to see the bottleneck when I run Doom. However RTG improves this a little.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuofHOAbSSs

Next is a quick test running Quake in Warp3D, as you can see it doesn't quite have the guys to do it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHkt2LepFo4

Annoyingly I never did do a proper Video of it running with the Prometheus.