First of all I have to say I'm not, in any way, linked to phase5 Gmbh, neither to any other Amiga company.
All these are just my own thought about this company and its products.

During the quite long life of my A1200 I have upgraded it a bit as soon I could afford the costs. So I had a Blizzard 1200/4, Blizzard 1220/4 and at last a Blizzard 1240 (after having considered a Blizzard 1230). All these boards are produced by the same german company, phase5.

I chose them as they were very competitive in terms of prices, and they were also good in terms of performances. So after my first bought, the 1200/4 I could personally test the quality of those boards (it was the fastest memory espansion on the market) and was convinced that finally someone had been able to build quality boards without the high prices (unlike the GVP).

The Blizzard 1220/4 was a confirmation of my previous thought, and this Blizzard 1240 just proves that I have always chosen the right way.

I then could see a friend of mine doing some other purchases: he bought a CyberStorm 060 MKII for his A4000. And these days he's just waiting for the new CyberVision64/3D to arrive.

I have never had any problems with those boards, and the money I invested into them were always well invested as I had no problem reselling my used boards for prices certainly not that cheap, due to the fact that they were of high quality.

phase5, even though is a relative young company, have been able to produce many of the absolute first boards for the Amiga market, like the first accelerator card with the 68060 and the first 64-bit gfx card. Moreover their efforts were spent tring to support the entire Amiga market, from the A1200s to the A2000/3000/4000 with all their products.
But their most famous product is surely the CyberGFX software that has imposed itself as the standard RTG software for the graphics boards, being able to support the most diffused board on the Amiga market.

I have lately followed all phase5's public announces, just to discover that, for them, release dates are not that important. They are, in fact, always delayed of some months, but on the other hand all the products they announced saw the light. I think this has more to do with the efforts put to improve the final quality of those boards then put in trying to respect same wrong announced release date.
One of the most interesting thing of this company is how it appears on the media, that is on the most famous magazines. They managed to become the leader company for Amiga add-ons in silence in few years, having spent almost no time in words and amazing announces, but concentrating on their work and in investing lots of money in real Research & Develpment, something that many other (once famous) company have forgotten to do (and have now disappeared or have seen their market reduced a lot).

So I were quite happy when they announced they were projecting PPC boards for the Amiga, knowing that they were doing a difficult thing. That decision has put new life into a machine which was not updated since 1992. And it is during these months that they are finalizing their work after having already shown a working prototype at many meetings.

Their decision to go and build a completely new computer (the A\BOX) has already brought the Amiga market into a excited mood and endless waiting for their creation.

Knowing the quality of their products I would say that, if that monster will ever see the light, it will be undoubtly a machine that could really be competitive against the now too standard PC compatible market (from which we'll have finally the option to "steal" low cost medium quality hardware).

What give me so great confidence in this "small" german company is the fact that they have invested lots of money in new, futuristic yet dangerous projects and they show a real faith in the Amiga achitecture even though they had lots of problems with the different managments of such technology. I don't know where they got the money for having started such projects, but I think that whoever has invested into them really wants them to see the light. For other informations, direct answers to important discussions and first hand news related on their products and projects, you can have a look at their WWW site: www.phase5.de.