Path: rcfnews.cs.umass.edu!barrett From: metin@stepout.tynet.sub.org (Metin Savignano) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: GVP G-Force 040 Combo Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.hardware Date: 25 Oct 1995 01:19:25 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 356 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <46k3at$o48@kernighan.cs.umass.edu> Reply-To: metin@stepout.tynet.sub.org (Metin Savignano) NNTP-Posting-Host: scooby.cs.umass.edu Keywords: hardware, accelerator, 68040, SCSI, serial, parallel, commercial Originator: barrett@scooby.cs.umass.edu PRODUCT NAME GVP G-Force 040 Combo BRIEF DESCRIPTION An accelerator board for A2000, featuring: - Motorola 68040 CPU (with a working MMU), clocked at 33 MHz. - a Series-II DMA SCSI host adapter on board. - an additional serial port. - an additional parallel port. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Please note: This board was originally designed and sold by Great Valley Products. GVP has ceased to exist, and the rights for this and other products have been bought by the German company MTec. However, this is a review on the original board by GVP. In the meantime, MTec has started advertising for the GVP products, but as far as I know, they are not yet sold. I was not possible either to find out if they are going to produce the original boards or modified versions of them; but since they advertise the G-Force at additional clock speeds, I suspect that they implement minor changes. The G-Force 040, for example, is being advertised as "up to" 40 MHz clock speed, whereas the original board is being clocked at 33 MHz. The following is the address of the vendor MTec: Name: MTec Hardware Design Address: Horster Str. 297 D-46238 Bottrop Germany Telephone: +49-2041-4656 FAX: +49-2041-4660 LIST PRICE The G-Force 040 for the A2000 is currently being advertised by MTec as "starting from DM 999" (approximately US$ 680). MTec was not able to give me more specific information. DEMO VERSION None. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE An Amiga 2000. SOFTWARE AmigaOS 2.04 or higher. COPY PROTECTION None. (Unless you think of the board itself as a big dongle.) MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 2000 Rev. 4.4 and Amiga 2000 Rev. 6.2 Additional boards were: Vector Connection and GVP I/O Extender multi I/O boards Masoboshi MC702 and GVP Series-II SCSI host adapters Picasso-II graphics board AmigaOS versions used: 2.04 and 3.1 RAM: 1 MB Chip mem, 2 MB on the GVP Series-II, else no additional fast mem. SCSI devices: Quantum LPS52S, Quantum LPS525LPS, IBM OEM 0662S12, HP 35480 DAT. INSTALLATION Several jumpers have to be checked first, according to the manual. However, usually the board should come configured correctly. Installing the board in the CPU slot is a bit more complicated than in other accelerator products, because of the additional serial and parallel ports. You have to be careful to loosen enough screws on the back of the Amiga, so the board will not have to be bent when plugging it in its slot. If you want to connect external SCSI drives, an additional slot's cover will have to be replaced by one with an external SCSI port (included). Software installation will be performed by the standard Installer. I did not have any problems with that. All files were in place afterwards. THE CPU The CPU is a Motorola 68040 with a working MMU, clocked at 33 MHz. Before the arrival of the 68060, this has been the fastest you could get for your Amiga. [MODERATOR'S NOTE: Actually, 40MHz 68040 boards are available from other vendors. - Dan] No need to say, it still is a roaring fast CPU. I am running a BBS with two lines with this board, and I hardly notice if or if not someone is online while I am answering my mail, compiling and testing programs, and so on. Compatibility has never been a problem for me. Unlike what I have heard of other 68040 boards, I have had no problems with any of my software. I even have the feeling that my Amiga is more stable than it was before. However, I must say that I hardly run any games on this Amiga. The fact that the G-Force is equipped with a special circuit in order to load the ROM into the much faster 32 bit RAM on board, allows the MMU to be free for any other task it could perform (like virtual memory). The other advantage is that a Guru will not cause the machine to hang with a black screen, like the way this usually happens when using CPU FastROM, but they will correctly appear, allowing the Amiga to re-boot after some seconds when using AmigaOS 3.1. This is certainly important for unattended systems. THE RAM In order to be able to use the CPU at full speed, it is naturally necessary to use faster RAM. The G-Force 040 can hold up to 4 SIMMs, either 4 or 16 MB each. Theoretically, this allows for up to 64 MB. Practically, RAM is the point where some problems come in. First of all, the G-Force 040 requires special SIMMs, having only 64 pins (PS/2 SIMMs have 72). These SIMMs are not at all readily available, so usually, it is necessary to buy them directly from MTec, formerly GVP. This leads to higher prices. At some times, the price for a GVP SIMM was 50% higher than the price for a PS/2 SIMM! I do hope that MTec will redesign the board, so the new ones will work with PS/2 SIMMs. The other problem is, that you cannot mix 4 MB and 16 MB SIMMs. This means that you have to sell your 4 MB SIMMs, if you want to use more than 16 MB. Even though 16 MB appears quite enough for me (after all, we are not running Windows on our Amiga ;), there are certainly applications that require more RAM. The third thing worth mentioning is, that you can only use the 68040's burst mode when all 4 memory slots are filled. This means, that you can only use burst mode with 16 (4x4) or 64 (4x16) MB. Burst mode is said to increase performance by approximately 10%. However, even without burst mode, the G-Force 040 was still fast enough for me! THE SCSI HOST ADAPTER The onboard SCSI host adapter is extremely delicious! It gives you a lot of benefits. First of all, this is a real GVP Series-II SCSI host adapter, featuring real DMA and (with the new Guru ROM driver) synchronous transfers. Second, because it is onboard, it can transfer data at very high rates directly to the onboard RAM, without the need to bother the Zorro-II bus. This fact gives you an extremely high total throughput, increasing the overall performance of your Amiga noticeably. SCSISpeed gave me transfer rates of up to 3.8 MB/Sec. Unfortunately, I do not have a faster SCSI device... A common problem with GVP's SCSI host adapters was found in the G-Force 040, too: no termination power is fed to the external SCSI connector. This makes it necessary to use active termination on external devices, otherwise the SCSI bus will not work. Even though it works well with active termination, the problem arises that you cannot connect an external device and leave it switched off, because then it will obviously be unable to feed termination power to the bus. In my case, the external device is a DAT streamer which I use only for backups, so most of the time it would be absolutely unnecessary to leave it on. As I have mentioned, this is a common problem with GVP's SCSI host adapters. According to what I have found out, GVP left out a diode and a fuse on all their boards that would the job, even though most, if not all, boards are already prepared for it. The place where to put the diode and the fuse is already printed on the board! This means that you can solder them onto the board by yourself quite easily. On the other hand, this also means that GVP saved approximately $2 in production... However, this hardware modification, together with Ralph Babel's new Guru ROM, turns the SCSI host adapter into a true SCSI-2 host adapter, also featuring the fast synchronous transfer mode! THE SERIAL PORT The G-Force 040 comes with an additional serial port onboard which is said to support up to 625,000 Baud. However, this was not true with my board. My board's serial port supported only a Baud rate of 57600. If I tried to lock my modem at a higher rate, it either would not work at all (no data transmission), or it would work, but when checking the real Baud rate, I found that it was still only 57600 Baud. I found this to be quite annoying, indeed! Unfortunately, I have not been able to find out, if other G-Force 040 users have the same problem, or if this is an isolated problem, nor did I find out, if this is a hardware or a software (device) problem. I know of one G-Force 040 user who did not have any problems at all, so this problem appears to be non-typical. I am sorry that I cannot give definite information on this particular detail. THE PARALLEL PORT The G-Force 040 also features an additional parallel port. There is not much to say about this port. I tried it, and it worked. It seems to be compatible by 100% with the original port. This port is said to be faster than the original one, but I could not check that out, since my printer is still by far slower than any parallel port. A jumper on the board allows you to choose between a truly IBM compatible or a truly Amiga compatible parallel port (i.e., if pin 14 of the interface does or doesn't supply +5 V). THE SOFTWARE Some software utilities are supplied with the G-Force 040. There are some programs that will display details on your hardware (similar to SysInfo) and the like, but I will not go into detail about them. However, the software that controls several aspects of the board should be mentioned. Prefs programs for the serial and the parallel port enable you to set Baud rate, handshake and all the other parameters. Additionally, for programs that do not access PRT: for example, a patch can be added to redirect all accesses meant for the original port to GVP's port. Another utility allows you to copy the ROM into the fast 32 bit RAM, using a special circuitry on the board. This allows the ROM to be copied to RAM without the help of the MMU. Therefore, the MMU can be used for other things, like virtual memory. The SCSI utility allows to switch on or off Disconnect for certain devices. This is useful, since some devices do not correctly reply to disconnect requests. In addition, the SCSI utility for the Guru ROM allows to enable or disable any SCSI feature (like synchronous transfers or parity checking) specifically for each device. The serial and parallel ports behave just like those on the GVP I/O Extender. They even use the same expansion drivers. This is very convenient, if you already own that board, since this will simply add two more ports to chose from with your existing software. DOCUMENTATION My board came with both, an English and a German manual. The English manual originally contained some errors in the description of the jumpers, but they had been corrected prior to delivery. The manual contains 65 pages, and is quite detailed. All in all, it gives a lot of helpful information, and I did not miss any important issues. It should be understandable for both beginners and experts. The only misinformation I found was about the external SCSI bus. According to the manual, this should work flawlessly. Not a word about the termination power problem. LIKES Of course, I do like a lot how fast and easy my Amiga now is. Before I got the G-Force 040, I owned a Commodore A2630 (68030 at 25 MHz). The speed increase of the CPU is very good, but I especially love the speed increase in SCSI access, provided by a very fast DMA host adapter that can directly write into the board's 32 bit RAM. I also do like the compatibility of the board. DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS For me, the fact that the board requires special 64 pin SIMMs is a problem that should be solved by MTec before they re-start production. Additionally, it would be convenient, if mixing 4MB and 16MB would be possible. The missing diode and fuse that led to problems connecting external devices is a really annoying misfeature. This should definitely be fixed. Another dislike is that the original fan was very loud. I had to replace it with a more silent one. This may have changed already, though. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS I can only compare the G-Force 040 to my former A2630. Of course, it is much better, say faster. I have no experiences with other 68040 boards, so I cannot make a comparison on the same CPU level. BUGS The external SCSI problem is definitely a bug. VENDOR SUPPORT As of now, vendor support is poor. Currently, the people at MTec keep telling me that they have no information on the GVP products yet, because the development is still in the USA. They forwarded my questions to the development team in the USA, and they also gave me their fax number. Even though I have sent an additional fax after a while, I did not hear a word from them. The only way to solve the external SCSI problem was to publically ask for help in the net. Thanks to those knowing people who are always ready to help! I found it annoying, too, that they advertise for the product, but were not even able to give exact prices. WARRANTY In Germany, a warranty of six months is requested by law. I have no information if MTec provides a longer warranty than that. CONCLUSIONS In my opinion, the G-Force 040 is a very good product. It used to be too expensive though (around US$ 1500), but MTec obviously decided to get competitive again, and lowered the prices significantly. Of course, this is also due to the fact that 68060 CPUs are beginning to become generally available, degrading the 68040 to "only" the second fast CPU available for the Amiga. My rating would be 4 stars out of 5. Once the external SCSI problem is fixed, and the use of PS/2 SIMMs is possible, I would give it 5 stars out of 5. All in all, I am very happy with this board, and I am glad that I bought it! COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright 1995 by Metin Savignano. Commercial use of this review not allowed without the author's permission. -- /\/\etin __ /// Power to the people: Motorola 68040 driven electrons __ /// \\\/// Internet: metin@stepout.tynet.sub.org \XX/ Fidonet: Metin Savignano (2:246/2248) --- Accepted and posted by Daniel Barrett, comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews