|1-Blizzard 1230-IV Review By Bolty The Blizzard 1230-IV is the latest and fastest '030 accelerator on the market at the moment. I chose it over the Apollo, despite the fact that Siren Software is about 100 yards from college and the Apollo is slightly faster, mainly because of the dodgy CPUs in the Apollos, and it was £20 quid cheaper, which came in handy for buying Alien Breed 3D. (Er... but the apollo has 2 SIMM sockets and a built in SCSI-II for the extra money, are you sure you saved at all? - Freak) I ordered the Blizzard from Gordon Harwoods, who seemed quite helpful and knowledgeable on the phone, with out being pushy or smart arsed like in Dixon's. I sent of the cheque for £179.95, plus £4 for 2 day postage. The Blizzard arrived two days later as promised, with the bloody delivery man getting me out of bed at 11am on a Thursday, the bastard. The board comes in a box similar in size to a video case. When you get through all the packaging, your first thoughts are "Shit, why have I just paid 200 quid for a few chips stuck on a tiny little board." although the build quality looks good and the big gold CPU looks impressive. Everything is surface mounted, except the CPU which is in a socket. There is also a spare socket for a 50Mhz PGA FPU. The only slight after thought to the board appears to be one small chip mounted at 45° to the board, with the clock battery straddled over the top of it. Time to plug it in. I thought it would just be like plugging in a printer or something, but this little bastard just would not go on the socket. It went into place, and the plug started to go in, but no matter how hard I pushed, it would not go on. The board was bending slightly and my thumbs were creasing, so I decided a different approach was in order. In the end I finished up with my mother board gripped tightly under one armpit, and the Blizzard grasped firmly in one hand. By wiggling it a lot from side to side it eventually went on. Now I just needed to snap off the plastic guide rails in the accelerator compartment, so I could get the thing back together again. Time to switch on. A few flashing blue lines appear and then the Amiga boots normally. I loaded up Sys-Info for a mips rating. 1.66 was the answer. I realised that these boards were slower without fast ram, but I didn't realise things would be this bad. I sent of for a 4Mb, 70Ns SIMM from Micro Direct in Manchester, for £78 + VAT + £8 for next day delivery. They again sent the order straight away. The SIMM looked even worse than the accelerater when I unwrapped it. It was just a 10x2cm board with 4 cheap looking chips on it. Luckily the SIMM socket is easily accessible from the trapdoor and the SIMM was very easy to install. Just locate it in the socket at an angle, then push it down so that it lies flat and is clipped in place. I rebooted and the extra 4 megs appeared automatically in the title bar. I thought about my unfortunate PC owning friends trying to upgrade their memory, and laughed. Sys-info now gave me a reasonable mips rating of 8.9ish. If you map Kick-start into fast ram you can bump this up to about 9.2. There are two ways of doing this, either with a jumper on the board, or the "CPU" dos command. I favour the latter as it is easy to switch off when you need the extra memory. I also use the CPU command in my start up to enable the data burst mode, which isn't switched on automatically for some reason. It doesn't seem to make much difference anyway, although I read somewhere that the burst modes only average out slightly faster, but in a worst case scenario they can drastically slow down the CPU. The mips rating of 9.91 given in the Blizzard advert was set with a 60Ns SIMM. Anyway, sys-info mips are crap. To get I real idea of the speed I loaded Amiga Intuition Benchmark, ram all the tests, then compared the results against the Blizzard 1230-III, the Apollo 1230, and a bog standard A1200. The Blizzard-IV averaged out slightly faster than the Blizzard-III, and 0.99 times the speed of the Apollo, although for all the graphics tests my card was 1.3 times faster for some reason, although I think this is probably something to do with video modes rather than the actual cards. For most tests all the cards were about 4-6 times faster than the A1200, but for a few graphics intensive tests this dropped to about 1.5-3 times faster. Power-wise, if you have a 3.5" hard drive like me, you will run out of watts. My Amiga kept crashing while de-archiving, which involved constant simultaneous hard drive, floppy drive, CPU, and memory access. Luckily I have an A500 supply, which is twice as powerful as the A1200's weedy affair, and this has been powering my system perfectly since. Also on the subject of power, the CPU gets very, very hot, and as it sits very close to the trapdoor with little or no ventilation, I decided to drill a nice grid of 16 holes in the trap door above the CPU. This looks pretty cool, as when you turn the Amiga upside down, you can see the nice gold CPU through the holes. Even with this ventilation though, after a couple of hours use you can feel the heat from the CPU over about a square foot under the desk. So what's it like in use? Well most serious programs such as Imagine, Pagestream, ImageFX, Wordworth etc. are now much more usable, with instant screen updates and very speedy renders. I was a bit disappointed with the results in Deluxe Paint though. I realise that custom chip processes will remain at the same speed, but things like converting a 24-bit picture down to 256 colours still takes an eternity. This is probably just down to shoddy programming though, as Viewtek can do it in a couple of seconds. Talking about Viewtek, GIFs now load as fast as IFFs and JPEGS load about as quickly as GIFs used to. Games wise all the Doom clones are super smooth, although it is frustrating because they are already pretty smooth on a basic A1200, and you know that your Amiga is now capable of much more. F1GP is now running at 20fps thanks to GP Ed 3, and looks excellent. Even at 205Mph the lines on the road scroll smoothly towards you, instead of flickering and flashing in front of you. Also much improved is Syndicate. Your men and cars actually move quickly and smoothly, even with basic body parts, instead of jerking and juddering around like OAPs/Skodas. I was a bit disappointed with Civilisation. Although the computer's moves are now instant, the crappy slow GUI remains. Also a disappointment was F/A-18 Interceptor. You just see a couple of seconds of how fast and smooth the game is, when it goes and crashes. I have not yet had time to sample my entire games collection for compatibility, but if you do find any problems, you can just hold down the "2" key after a reset, and you accelerator and memory will vanish, enabling anything that worked previously to run again. You can also try experimenting with the various cache modes on offer. The extra 4 megs come in very useful now too. You can actually use the Amiga's multitasking in all its glory. Taking things one program at a time though, you can now use the full power of large programs. Also nowadays a lot of programs such as Wordworth 3, Imagine 3 etc. refuse to run with the standard 2 megs, and others are severly crippled. The only game so far I have found that uses all the extra memory is Skidmarks 2. You can now race 8 different cars at once, instead of 2. Often overlooked, but very useful, is the real time clock. All files are datestamped, and you are no longer forced to rotate your wrist and study your watch face, but instead you can just glance at the top of your screen, where the correct time is displayed in the title bar, thanks to some little PD program. Hurrah! Summary ======= Pluses ====== -Genuine 50Mhz 68030 CPU, not clocked or with any numbers scratched off like the Apollo -Very cheep at £180, but you can get the SIMMs cheaper elsewhere -MMU, although I've not managed to get VMem working yet -9.91mips if you have a 60Ns SIMM -Optional FPU -Optional SCSI-II interface, with another SIMM socket -Can be disabled completely by holding down "2" on a reboot. -Realtime clock -Plenty of room for it in the trapdoor -Excellent service from Harwoods -Good build quality -Manual details everything you need to know Minuses ======= -Will not go on socket, although I expect most accelerators are the same. Amiga Format claimed that the Blizzard was easy to fit though, so perhaps I am just a bit of a retard. -Not quite as fast as the Apollo -Crippled without a SIMM -Only one SIMM socket unless you get the SCSI interface. -Eats power and gets very hot. -Would have been good for beginners if there was a disk included with a few relevant PD utilities such as Sys-info, some sort of degrader, and a demo or Doom clone demo which took advantage of the chip. Conclusion ========== It's brill, so get one now you silly sheep farmers. End