Blizzard 1230 MKIV voting gone mad

[Harrison]

Blizzard boards are generally regarded as the best accelerators you can buy, with Viper and Apollo cards being next in line.

[Zetr0]

its interesting how people flock to certain brands of accelerator card.

Although there is a small element of truth, there are a lot of misunderstoods in the realms of performance.


Lets see if i can impart some usefull information.

First LAW:-
Although Fast ram is crucial for performance, at the end of the day, that data WILL end up in chip memory for use with the custom chipsets

Acceess times:-
This is goverend by a few factors and they are

• CLOCK SPEED
• LATCHING Times
  
  • Reading Memories
  • Writing Memories
  • logic routing

Now you might think that the Clock Frequency goverens all, but it is infact limmited to Latching Times, and arguably because of the Frequnecy it Imposes on the circuit some latching times will differ.

Now... complicated stuff, its enough to give hardware engineers and designers nightmares to behonest however to know that these problems and facets exist its enough to move onto the Next stage


Because of Latching speeds some Frequencies are more effcient at catching access times, remember, every chip, integrated circuit has a propagation and process speed so this is where it can get REAL confusing.

so where does this leave the 3 most known Accelerator cards of the A1200 ?

well interestingly due to their differing design not really top or bottom, infact, like most things, depends on your needs.

so lets have a look

Starting with A for Apollo *ACT
Apollo 1230 Mk1 / Mk2 & Mk3 (manufactured A1200 030 cards since 1994)


The limmits of these cards is in maxium of memory the memory controller can handle, in the mk1 & 2 it is 32MB of RAM where as in the Mk3 64MB is the limmit (with the addition of an aftermarket 72pin SIMM port)


Remeber B is for Blizzard *phase 5*
(one the most prolific companies started making 030's since 1993)

The Blizzard line of accelerators is in an interesting one, with 4 versions of Blizzard 030

Limmitations
The Mk1 and Mk2 can have a maximum of 64MB of Ram where the Mk3 can only have 32MB of Ram. The latter revision MkIV can have upto 128MB of RAM,

All of these Cards share an Addon known as the Blizzard SCSI, this after market purchase has the option to increase the amount of memory a further 128MB on all cards

now V is for Viper

Wow, now the Viper name is a bit of a minoma, lots of companies made Viper's with 030's, from MTech, DKB and even ACT

Have a look here its perhaps just to various to list in truth LOL

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so with that whats the best, fastest ?!

Using a common Benchmark, AIBB for instance, some interesting things emerge,

The Apollo 030's infact have aproximately 10% faster Chip Ram Access compaired to thier Blizzard counterparts, personally I suspect thats newer range components with faster propagation times in truth.

The Blizzards have a slightly faster FAST RAM access, this I believe is down to better implementation of the memory controller thats used, however the exact speed difference is suseptable to data load.

The best thing to do is check on

amiga resource AIBB scorres

[Harrison]

From my point of view, most of the best known accelerators are pretty much on a par in terms of CPU performance. For me the differences that count are build quality and reliability. And the Blizzard cards are in my view the best made cards with what always looks like a lot of care and attention to detail in their design and build. Some of the other makes of card don't look like they have had quite the same level of expense given to them in the production phase.

Another make that did always impress me in terms of quality was GVP products. You always paid a bit more for GVP over some other lessor known makes, but you got what you paid for. Their A500 sidecar expansions were the best by far (I would still love to get hold of a GVP A530), and the Zorro cards I've owned from them have always worked really well (especially their SCSI cards).

We will definitely have to start writing an A1200 accelerator guide in the Wiki soon to help explain the differences between the makes and models. And I will definitely need your help Zetr0 for the more technical bits.