Sam440ep and Radeon 9200 - is it worth it?

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prowler
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Sam440ep and Radeon 9200 - is it worth it?

Post by prowler »

I have a Sam440ep (mini-ITX not the flex) and a spare Radeon 9200 with 256Mb of RAM.

Due to the speed of the PCI on this motherboard, I am curious if there is any real benefit of using the Radeon 9200 other than the extra Graphics memory it provides to the system?
K-L
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Re: Sam440ep and Radeon 9200 - is it worth it?

Post by K-L »

Except for the extra memory, you won't have any benefit from it.

Radeon M9 is connected via a 66Mhz PCI bus whereas the PCI slot is only 33Mhz. Your Radeon 9200 will be slower than your M9 chipset.

What's more, Radeon M9 is as fast as a Radeon 9000 Pro (fastest card supported in 3D by AmigaOS 4.1 at the moment). Radeon 9200 is little bit slower.
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AmigaONE X1000 / Radeon 2400 Pro (R610LE) / AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition
Samm440ep/733Mhs (o/c) / Radeon M9 / AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition
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ChrisH
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Re: Sam440ep and Radeon 9200 - is it worth it?

Post by ChrisH »

@prowler
It would be a trade-off: You would gain extra video memory, but OS4's access to it would be slower (due to 33MHz instead of 66MHz bus).

So you would see improved speed if you are often running out of video memory (due to using large resolutions, 32-bit depth & enabling compositing) BUT you would see slower speed if you did not often run out of video memory. You can check how much video memory you have by using Prefs/Workbench to add " %mgm MB video free" to the Workbench's titlebar.
prowler
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Re: Sam440ep and Radeon 9200 - is it worth it?

Post by prowler »

Thanks for the useful feedback.

I have been deliberating about what to use in the single available PCI slot the Sam440ep has, the graphics card (if it gave some sort of performance increase) or a catweasel. I think I will go the catweasel with the added benefit that there are drivers in the update 5 which was recently released.
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