Subject: REVIEW: GVP A530 Turbo accelerator and hard drive
From: [email-masked] (Lynn Winebarger)
Date: 4 Dec 1992 04:22:56 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

PRODUCT NAME

	GVP A530 Turbo

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

	This is a 40 Mhz accelerator with SCSI controller and 32-bit RAM
expansion slots for the Amiga 500.  It comes with a hard drive and 1 meg of
RAM installed.

AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION

	Name:		Great Valley Products
	Address:	600 Clark Avenue
			King of Prussia, PA  19406
			USA

	Telephone:	215-337-8770
	FAX:		215-337-9922

LIST PRICE

	I am not sure what the list price of this product is, but the average
mail-order price falls between US$1050-$1100.  I ended up paying $1100
because of my impatience :).  I have also added a 40 Mhz 68882 ($129 without
shipping and COD) and a GVP 4 meg SIMM-32 which is listed at $299, though I
paid $209 ($220 with shipping and COD).

	If you already have a GVP series II, you can trade up to the A530 for
$400-$800, depending on what options you want.  Best to call GVP about this
program.

	[MODERATOR'S NOTE:  I have seen the list prices reported as:

		A530 with 120 MB hard drive	$1379.00
		A530 with 213 MB hard drive	$1718.00
		68882 chip for A530		$ 325.00

	All prices are in US dollars. - Dan]

SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

   HARDWARE

	An Amiga 500.

   SOFTWARE
   
	Amiga operating system version 1.3 or higher.

MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

	A500 with the A530 plugged in :).

	The A500 has 1 meg of chip memory (using the hack for the A501),
though the hack wasn't done until after I had installed the A530 and been
using it for a little while.  Suddenly, one half meg of chip memory just wasn't
enough at all.
      
REVIEW

	After receiving the A530, it took me about ten minutes to have a
fully functional, autobooting hard drive and accelerator.  This is because
GVP has put both 2.0 and 1.3 on the hard-drive and upon the first boot gives
the user the option of using their fast-prep program, which detects the ROMs
you have and installs the proper Workbench.  There's also an expert prep
program you can use to configure the hard drive exactly the way you want it,
but I thought fast prep worked just fine.

	By the way, all the mail-order houses I contacted only had the
version with the 121 MB Maxtor drive, but it's supposed to come with other
sizes of drives (and corresponding prices as well), as well as just using
your current hard drive in the trade-up deal. (BTW, that is 121 MB
formatted.)

	GVP has put some hardware in the A530 to allow you to map the ROMs
into memory, even though it uses a 68EC030, so I did that and it works
great.  Note that Kickstart and the rest of Workbench fills up that 1 MB of
32-bit RAM really easily.  So I ordered the 4 MB SIMM-32, and now there's no
problem.  GVP might be selling them with the 4 MB installed, so contact them
about that.

	I also got a 68882 and stuck it in (about 10 minutes work, what with
opening the case and all.)  Unfortunately I didn't record any benchmarks
before installing the coprocessor, though I looked at SysInfo, and the speed
comparison tests are _about_ the same before and after the 68882.

	Speaking of which, here are the speeds (using SysInfo 3.01), with 4
MB of 32-bit RAM, and of 32-bit RAM and a 40 MHz 68882 installed:

    Dhrystones        5989
    MIPS              6.25
    MFLOPS            1.13

Speed Comparison

    Machine                   How many times faster is the A530?
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------
    A500/A600 Standard        10.20
    B2000  Extra RAM           8.56
    B2000  GVP A3001           1.00
    A2500  A2620               2.91
    A3000  25 MHz              1.29
    A3000  PP&S 68040          0.29  (I knew 040's were fast, but wow!)
    ChipRam vs. A3000          0.37

	While using only 1 MB of 32-bit RAM and putting ROMs into memory
(and then only having 16-bit memory left for usage) I got only about 9.5
times a standard A500 (I believe), while booting with ROMs made it about 11
times.  These comparisons were made using SysInfo 2.69; sorry about the
discrepancy, I didn't feel the need for the update until I thought about
doing this review.

	This thing certainly flies now in comparison with the 500 I once
knew, and it's very good for doing number crunching (which is good, since I
use it for mathematical work).  Scrolling and such also seem to be faster,
even though the coprocessors are still 7.14 MHz and accessed through a
16-bit bus.

	The Maxtor Hard-drive is fetching data at ~1 MB/sec, according to
SysInfo.  The RAM is the standard 60 ns that GVP uses in its 68030
accelerators.

	There's a turbo switch on the face of the accelerator so that you can
turn it on and off for full compatibility with old games.  Unfortunately,
you can't turn off the 68030 without also losing the RAM and the Hard Drive.
There's full SCSI passthru with a 25-pin bus on the back of the accelerator,
and you get a power supply for the A530 so that it doesn't overload your
poor, overworked A500.  

DOCUMENTATION

	The A530 comes with two manuals:  one about setting up and expanding
the accelerator, including a "theory of operation" section, and one about the
HD formatting and Preparation Utility.  It seems like fair documentation,
and it's certainly printed nicely.  At times it seems a little simplistic;
however (as they say, and I'd probably have to agree), this is the
easiest-to-use accelerator around.  So no real knowledge is assumed on the
part of the reader, because _anybody_ can put this thing on.

LIKES AND DISLIKES

	What do I like about this product?  The speed, the good name that GVP
enjoys among 3rd party developers especially in with customer service, a 2
year warranty on the product, full SCSI passthru, 121 MB hard-drive, speed,
the turbo switch, 32-bit RAM, ease of installation, and speed.  (Also, if I
still had warranty on the A500, I wouldn't have voided it by installing
this).  Also, the ease of adding the 68882 and changing the RAM was nice.

	What do I dislike about the A530?  Not much, now that I have the
extra RAM installed.  The price seems pretty expensive, especially with all
the new Amigas coming out, and the RAM prices are outrageous (then again,
that's not just GVP's fault).  But the A530 will give you a very good
machine, if you don't absolutely need the enhanced graphics [that the AGA
chip gives you].  I just remember some debate in comp.sys.amiga.hardware or
comp.sys.amiga.misc about whether to get a 1200 or an A530; it really
depends on what you want and what you need; 40 MHz is still twice as fast as
the 1200 (should) be, and it gives you an 030 based machine.  It's really
very integrated.

	Other than the price, there was one small problem I had that I
describe below, in the BUGS section.  Maybe you can count noisiness (a fan
is needed to keep that 030 from burnin' up :).  But that's about it.

	Overall, I really enjoy having it.

COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS

	No, I have never used a similar product.  But I can't imagine it
getting much better than this, except maybe a lower price.

BUGS

	I have found one bug.  With only 1 meg of RAM, I would get errors
while downloading files straight onto the hard-drive at 9600 baud.  This can
be extremely annoying, especially with a RAM: limited to 1 meg.  But once I
started using Term 2.2a (gift-ware), the problem was solved:  even though
Term would get errors while writing the data, it would use CRC to force a
retry or something.  Whatever it was, I no longer had to download to RAM:.
Also, having 4 MB now seems to have totally fixed the problem, because I
don't get any errors at all while using the hard drive.  I don't know if
this is related to having just 1 MB or if there's a problem with the 1 MB
SIMMs.  I also noticed a patch for this problem at wuarchive.wustl.edu, in
the /sys/amiga/(?)incoming/patch (maybe) directory called gvppatch.  

VENDOR SUPPORT

	Haven't had any real problems yet.

WARRANTY

	2-year limited factory warranty.

CONCLUSIONS

	Obviously, I like the product.  I would recommend it to anyone having
sufficient funds to also get the 4 MB of RAM and the 68882.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

	Copyright 1992 Lynn Winebarger.  All rights reserved.

	This review is freely distributable, but I disclaim any
	responsibility for any result of using this review (just in case).

---

   Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews
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