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Mac IIfx vs. Amiga 3000 vs. Atari Falcon/TT030

G4UGM said:
Sorry Guys, its just got to the be the TT030. It might not be the fastest, or most expandable. It won't run most ST games. It needs a hi-res graphics card , BUT it looks the coolest.
Come on. No computer ever built looks as nice as an A3000!:D

Ah, but you forget the Amiga 3000T. When you look up "tower" in the dictionary, you see a picture of the Tower of London and the Amiga 3000T :) It may not be the fastest but it's absolutely the biggest and heaviest and it doubles for a good hiding spot for "hide n seek".
And the Mediator fits in it!

No one ever forgets the A3000T, just no one ever has one. That or a rack-mounted A3000. I'm lucky enough just to have a 'UX!

There was(or is) an A3000+ motherboard for sale on eBay recently. :rockedov:

In my opinion, there's no need to compare. Just get all three and enjoy them for their own merits.
I agree. I never really thought there was a point in comparing. But, my A3000 does do everything I need it to do. Could the others? Maybe, it doesn't really matter.
 
Ah, but you forget the Amiga 3000T. When you look up "tower" in the dictionary, you see a picture of the Tower of London and the Amiga 3000T :) It may not be the fastest but it's absolutely the biggest and heaviest and it doubles for a good hiding spot for "hide n seek".

Then you've never seen a Gateway 2000 4DX2-66V:

24g4krs.jpg
 
O come on that's way off topic.

Not terribly so, considering that the A3000T just used a slightly modified PC-clone case, as did the A4000 and A4000T, courtesy of Commodore CEO Mehdi Ali's plan to cut costs by making the Amiga hardware more PC-like and sharing parts with Commodore's slow-selling line of PC-clones.
 
I have a couple of those gateway towers, they are heavy, but my Zenith Data Systems P90 tower is heavier.
 
Not terribly so, considering that the A3000T just used a slightly modified PC-clone case, as did the A4000 and A4000T, courtesy of Commodore CEO Mehdi Ali's plan to cut costs by making the Amiga hardware more PC-like and sharing parts with Commodore's slow-selling line of PC-clones.

The A4000T used a Enlight full AT case. Unlike Commodore's in-house designs, it was high quality. I really can't say Commodore's cases pre-4000 were all that great either. Look at all the broken bits you find on the average A2000 and A3000 desktop case.
 
I agree, the A4000T cases were nice. The original was a little sexier than the boxy Escoms/QuikPaks, but my QuikPak is still very attractive.

I had an A4000 in an A4001T case for a period of time (sold to another collector). That was one of the megatowers and was a little crazy.
 
Those A1200's turned into towers are some of the nastiest kludges I have seen with wires and adapters all over the place.

I kind of like the 3000T original towers but few were made.

What broken bits are you talking about on the A2000 case? The faceplates (only plastic parts) seem to hold up well. Hate the A3000 floppies and their custom eject buttons plus the stupid place they put the accelerator slot with no cooling.
 
I have and have had a whole slew of A2000s and A3000s and have never had any issues with cases, except the A2000 case, case cover, and drives never line up no matter what I do. But, no broken parts.

The A3000 desktop case is one of the strongest desktop cases that I know of.
 
There was a company that sold modified IIfx boards OC'ed to 50mhz, I'm sure you weren't able to get anywhere close to that with the A3000 or the Ataris with the stock CPU.*

http://lowendmac.com/clones/dash.html

(* I'm sure there were OCs for those machines that managed better percentage-wise; you can overclock the rare-ish 16mhz A3000s to 25mhz pretty trivially which is a 50% overclock vs. the 25% 40mhz->50mhz is.)

Of course, once you start down the "OC" road we're going to end up right back at arguing whether the overclocked 225Mhz PPC604 cards you can shove in an Amiga count, because if they do obviously it wins, no matter how not-in-the-spirit of things it is.
 
at some point the host system becomes a terminal for the upgrade. You can plug anything in anything.

Early multiprocessor cooperation is more interesting to me. Symbiotic relationships. Vying for power. Something like Cyberdyne vs. a consortium of HAL, Vger, and, I don't know, a gigantic grid of interconnected Raspbarry Pi's. Just a comparison.
 
next question, to what degree can these machines be overclocked? Not likely you could drop a 40mhz '030 in a A3000/Falcon/TT030.

Why not?

I don't know that anyone ever did put a 40MHz 68030 in an A3000, because the next step up from stock was usually the A3640, which is a 25MHz 68040. Beyond that, there were 40MHz 68040 boards.

What do you consider overclocking though? In the A3000, there are separate clocks. One of mine has a 50MHz 68060 in it (and a 200MHz PowerPC 604e).

I have an A500 with a 50MHz 68030 (no case modifications) and several A2000s with 50MHz 68060s.
 
at some point the host system becomes a terminal for the upgrade. You can plug anything in anything.

True, but have any of these machines reached that point? Some will say that running OS4.x on an A3000 is at that point. But, I disagree. The whole machine is still working as designed, except for the main CPU.
 
Why not?

I don't know that anyone ever did put a 40MHz 68030 in an A3000, because the next step up from stock was usually the A3640, which is a 25MHz 68040. Beyond that, there were 40MHz 68040 boards.

What do you consider overclocking though? In the A3000, there are separate clocks. One of mine has a 50MHz 68060 in it (and a 200MHz PowerPC 604e).

I have an A500 with a 50MHz 68030 (no case modifications) and several A2000s with 50MHz 68060s.

You can't simply drop a faster '030 in a IIx and get a IIfx. Oftentimes the other chips, although they themselves could be available in faster versions, can't handle additional speed. To a point yes. Every computer is overclockable to an extent, but there are limits.
Every computer has multiple clocks, crystals, whatever, I'm not sure what you mean exactly in the case of the A3000. The IBM PC used the same crystal for the system clock (divided it by 3 to get 4.77mhz), and the color burst signal (3.58mhz), which was a division by 4. There's also the ram refresh, which was a hack, but I believe depended on the system clock/main crystal.
 
The IIfx had a PDS slot and there are 040 processor upgrades for it (rare and the MB needed work to fix an Apple DMA bug). You also have Radius Rockets for Nubus machines (68040 25/33/40mhz with built in RAM slots).
 
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