Upgrading the 2500
8 messages in this thread
I have a 2500 I want to upgrade. Are there any constraints on using
accelerators on top of the 020? That is, can I consider that anything made for
a 2000, such as the GVP A2000 accelerator, will also work seamlessly on a 2500?
Jack,
Upgrading the A2500 means replacing the '020 accelerator board. So
any of the A2000 accelerator boards available will work. I am running with
a GVP G-Force 030 board right now, and it is 'seamless'.
–> via autopilot
inet: cjoa@blnt1.chi.il.us
Thanks for the help! Wanted to make sure before I laid out all the
bucks.
Jack;
One hates to make positive statements that might misslead however, a GVP
(or anyone elses) accelerator that is designed to work in an A2000 should
work just fine in an A2500. In fact the probability that there will be no
problems is higher with the A2500 than with the A2000 in that the existing
accelerator is already doing much of what any other accelerator whould
have to do.
BTW, I have a G-Force 040 that I installed into an A2500. No problems so
far.
-bill
Thanks for the reply! The perennial question arises: to upgrade, or
spend about the same on an IBM.
Do you have the chance to directly compare your 040 with a 486? Do you
interface with DOS programs? If I want to keep the Amiga for the graphics,
aren't the available bridgeboards pretty "old" – AT/XT/CGA – and costly?
Jack;
Let me start with the "I am an anti-DOS bigot!" Understand that I hate
DOS and consider it to have been the first and one of the biggest steps
backward that the micro-computer industry ever took. Even HeathKit's HDOS
was a very advanced OS compared to DOS (circa 1976).
Now running '486 boxes is not something that I do often or for long
periods of time (it just seems that way). The only '486 boxes that I have
worked with are pretty well top end machines (>$10K not counting monitor
and drives). These machines seem to compare pretty favorably to my Amiga
3000 system. Disk i/o appears at times to be faster and at other times to
be slower. Screen update appears about the same except that when
comparing windowing operations the Ami is clearly faster.
I have not really done enough with the '040 to really get a good feel for
comparison but first impressions (as wrong as they might be) are that a
'486 would not keep up in any real world activity. Again you need to
temper these comments with my almost vicious hate of Intel and MicroSloth.
OTOH, you also need to keep in mind that the comparision machines are
fast, 20 MB ram, top end graphics boards, gigabyte scsi II's with $3K
monitors. These are about as serious as you can get with a PC.
-bill