Path: menudo.uh.edu!menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: khan@cheshire.oxy.EDU (Lynn Winebarger) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: GVP A530 Turbo accelerator and hard drive Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.hardware Date: 4 Dec 1992 04:22:56 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 223 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <1fmmf0INN9jk@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: khan@cheshire.oxy.EDU (Lynn Winebarger) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: hardware, A500, accelerator, 68030, commercial PRODUCT NAME GVP A530 Turbo BRIEF DESCRIPTION This is a 40 Mhz accelerator with SCSI controller and 32-bit RAM expansion slots for the Amiga 500. It comes with a hard drive and 1 meg of RAM installed. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Great Valley Products Address: 600 Clark Avenue King of Prussia, PA 19406 USA Telephone: 215-337-8770 FAX: 215-337-9922 LIST PRICE I am not sure what the list price of this product is, but the average mail-order price falls between US$1050-$1100. I ended up paying $1100 because of my impatience :). I have also added a 40 Mhz 68882 ($129 without shipping and COD) and a GVP 4 meg SIMM-32 which is listed at $299, though I paid $209 ($220 with shipping and COD). If you already have a GVP series II, you can trade up to the A530 for $400-$800, depending on what options you want. Best to call GVP about this program. [MODERATOR'S NOTE: I have seen the list prices reported as: A530 with 120 MB hard drive $1379.00 A530 with 213 MB hard drive $1718.00 68882 chip for A530 $ 325.00 All prices are in US dollars. - Dan] SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE An Amiga 500. SOFTWARE Amiga operating system version 1.3 or higher. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING A500 with the A530 plugged in :). The A500 has 1 meg of chip memory (using the hack for the A501), though the hack wasn't done until after I had installed the A530 and been using it for a little while. Suddenly, one half meg of chip memory just wasn't enough at all. REVIEW After receiving the A530, it took me about ten minutes to have a fully functional, autobooting hard drive and accelerator. This is because GVP has put both 2.0 and 1.3 on the hard-drive and upon the first boot gives the user the option of using their fast-prep program, which detects the ROMs you have and installs the proper Workbench. There's also an expert prep program you can use to configure the hard drive exactly the way you want it, but I thought fast prep worked just fine. By the way, all the mail-order houses I contacted only had the version with the 121 MB Maxtor drive, but it's supposed to come with other sizes of drives (and corresponding prices as well), as well as just using your current hard drive in the trade-up deal. (BTW, that is 121 MB formatted.) GVP has put some hardware in the A530 to allow you to map the ROMs into memory, even though it uses a 68EC030, so I did that and it works great. Note that Kickstart and the rest of Workbench fills up that 1 MB of 32-bit RAM really easily. So I ordered the 4 MB SIMM-32, and now there's no problem. GVP might be selling them with the 4 MB installed, so contact them about that. I also got a 68882 and stuck it in (about 10 minutes work, what with opening the case and all.) Unfortunately I didn't record any benchmarks before installing the coprocessor, though I looked at SysInfo, and the speed comparison tests are _about_ the same before and after the 68882. Speaking of which, here are the speeds (using SysInfo 3.01), with 4 MB of 32-bit RAM, and of 32-bit RAM and a 40 MHz 68882 installed: Dhrystones 5989 MIPS 6.25 MFLOPS 1.13 Speed Comparison Machine How many times faster is the A530? --------------------------------------------------------------------- A500/A600 Standard 10.20 B2000 Extra RAM 8.56 B2000 GVP A3001 1.00 A2500 A2620 2.91 A3000 25 MHz 1.29 A3000 PP&S 68040 0.29 (I knew 040's were fast, but wow!) ChipRam vs. A3000 0.37 While using only 1 MB of 32-bit RAM and putting ROMs into memory (and then only having 16-bit memory left for usage) I got only about 9.5 times a standard A500 (I believe), while booting with ROMs made it about 11 times. These comparisons were made using SysInfo 2.69; sorry about the discrepancy, I didn't feel the need for the update until I thought about doing this review. This thing certainly flies now in comparison with the 500 I once knew, and it's very good for doing number crunching (which is good, since I use it for mathematical work). Scrolling and such also seem to be faster, even though the coprocessors are still 7.14 MHz and accessed through a 16-bit bus. The Maxtor Hard-drive is fetching data at ~1 MB/sec, according to SysInfo. The RAM is the standard 60 ns that GVP uses in its 68030 accelerators. There's a turbo switch on the face of the accelerator so that you can turn it on and off for full compatibility with old games. Unfortunately, you can't turn off the 68030 without also losing the RAM and the Hard Drive. There's full SCSI passthru with a 25-pin bus on the back of the accelerator, and you get a power supply for the A530 so that it doesn't overload your poor, overworked A500. DOCUMENTATION The A530 comes with two manuals: one about setting up and expanding the accelerator, including a "theory of operation" section, and one about the HD formatting and Preparation Utility. It seems like fair documentation, and it's certainly printed nicely. At times it seems a little simplistic; however (as they say, and I'd probably have to agree), this is the easiest-to-use accelerator around. So no real knowledge is assumed on the part of the reader, because _anybody_ can put this thing on. LIKES AND DISLIKES What do I like about this product? The speed, the good name that GVP enjoys among 3rd party developers especially in with customer service, a 2 year warranty on the product, full SCSI passthru, 121 MB hard-drive, speed, the turbo switch, 32-bit RAM, ease of installation, and speed. (Also, if I still had warranty on the A500, I wouldn't have voided it by installing this). Also, the ease of adding the 68882 and changing the RAM was nice. What do I dislike about the A530? Not much, now that I have the extra RAM installed. The price seems pretty expensive, especially with all the new Amigas coming out, and the RAM prices are outrageous (then again, that's not just GVP's fault). But the A530 will give you a very good machine, if you don't absolutely need the enhanced graphics [that the AGA chip gives you]. I just remember some debate in comp.sys.amiga.hardware or comp.sys.amiga.misc about whether to get a 1200 or an A530; it really depends on what you want and what you need; 40 MHz is still twice as fast as the 1200 (should) be, and it gives you an 030 based machine. It's really very integrated. Other than the price, there was one small problem I had that I describe below, in the BUGS section. Maybe you can count noisiness (a fan is needed to keep that 030 from burnin' up :). But that's about it. Overall, I really enjoy having it. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS No, I have never used a similar product. But I can't imagine it getting much better than this, except maybe a lower price. BUGS I have found one bug. With only 1 meg of RAM, I would get errors while downloading files straight onto the hard-drive at 9600 baud. This can be extremely annoying, especially with a RAM: limited to 1 meg. But once I started using Term 2.2a (gift-ware), the problem was solved: even though Term would get errors while writing the data, it would use CRC to force a retry or something. Whatever it was, I no longer had to download to RAM:. Also, having 4 MB now seems to have totally fixed the problem, because I don't get any errors at all while using the hard drive. I don't know if this is related to having just 1 MB or if there's a problem with the 1 MB SIMMs. I also noticed a patch for this problem at wuarchive.wustl.edu, in the /sys/amiga/(?)incoming/patch (maybe) directory called gvppatch. VENDOR SUPPORT Haven't had any real problems yet. WARRANTY 2-year limited factory warranty. CONCLUSIONS Obviously, I like the product. I would recommend it to anyone having sufficient funds to also get the 4 MB of RAM and the 68882. COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright 1992 Lynn Winebarger. All rights reserved. This review is freely distributable, but I disclaim any responsibility for any result of using this review (just in case). --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu General discussion: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu