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1996-02-14
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4KB
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94 lines
Blizzard 1230-IV Turbo Board
----------------------------
Phase 5
From: Gordon Harwood £179.95
For those of you who have never heard of Phase 5 or their brilliant range
of turbo boards for the A1200/A4000 and other Amiga's here is a small bit
of info.
Phase 5 are a German company producing many Amiga hardware bits'n'bobs
but they have sprung to fame with the Blizzard range of turbo boards.
All the boards run at chip legal speeds, this means the Motorola chip
hasn't been altered in anyway to make it run faster, commonly known as
'clocking'. This is common practice in the PC world and is starting to
encroach on the Amiga world. The problem with clocking a chip is it runs
at a speed faster than it is spose to and this ends with the computer
locking up at times and worse still the CPU burning out! So you will be
glad to know that Phase 5 don't clock the chips :)
The Blizzard 1230-IV Turbo Board is an 030 based turbo card for the A1200
that plugs into the trap door slot some of its features are.
68030 CPU with MMU at 50Mhz
So this means the average performance of your A1200 will increase by up
to 500% In tests I found it to run at least 4-5 times faster than a basic
A1200 and twice as fast as a A4000/030. Now thats speed for you.
A 72 pin SIMM socket that takes the standard single-sided or double-sided
SIMMS. It will also take the 32 bit sims and the PC style 36bit sims.
As the 36bit SIMS are in use more by the PC this option could save a few
pounds. Another bonus is the board auto configs to the SIMM you plug
into the socket, so there is no need to play around with jumpers.
Map ROM function.
This if set will load the Amiga ROM into fast RAM and by doing so will
speed up many operations. The downside being it takes up 512k of memory.
Option to install a maths co-processor. If you use your Amiga a lot for
Raytracing or any other maths work then you can speed up those type of
tasks by installing a maths co-processor.
DMA connector.
This little interface built into the card will allow a extra SCSI card to
be plugged in that will give full fast SCSI compatibility. The SCSI card
also has room for another 128megs of ram. NOTE: this card is an option
and costs around £90.00
Asynchronous design.
This means if you use a genlock with your Amiga this board runs in time
with the system clock so all video out put etc will be perfectly stable.
Some turbo board cannot be used with genlocks so take care.
Real-Time clock with recharging battery.
Why did the old Commodore never put a battery backed up clock in the
A1200? Anyway this board has one, what else could you want?
Installing the card.
The card was a bit of a bugger to install as its a tight fit in the
trapdoor but once installed it ran OK even if it did seem to get a bit on
the hot side. The heat generated worried me so much I took the trap door
off and drilled a few small holes in it with a hand drill. Then rased
the Amiga slightly off the desk buy placing a few extra rubber stops on
the ones all ready on the bottom of the Amiga. This let some air get to
the turbo board and made me feel a bit better. Although as the Motorola
chip hasn't been clocked it shouldn't over heat anyhow.
Anyhow the board has been in my A1200 that runs a 24hr BBS 7 days a week
and it hasn't over heated yet.
Right here comes the only niggle I had with the board, sometimes when
inserting a disk into the floppy drive the computer would crash. This
might not be fair to blame the board as I pretty sure its the fault of
the old Commodore PSU that gives out a very wimpy power. So if you do
buy this board I think you best think about buying a Goliath PSU at the
same time.
To sum up if your after a turbo board for your A1200 at a price that wont
destroy your bank balance then consider this one. The price is right and
its one of the fastest around and remember the chip hasn't been clocked.
MADNESS
END
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