Questions about SAM

I am strongly considering to buy a SAM 440EP but I have some questions that I hope can be answered first. Her they are:

- You can use a standard ATX PSU, right?

- Can I use a Radeon 9200 AGP graphics card? In other words, is there an AGP port on the board? If not, does it work with Radeon 9250 PCI?

- Will the AMCC 460 CPU be supported in the future? (Clock speed up to 1.4 GHz at the moment).

I am grateful for any help.

@Niolator

Forget the question about the graphics card. I just found out that the M9 chipset is faster than both Radeon 9200 and 9250, it is in fact not much slower than a Radeon 8500.

Hi ;)

Effectively, you can use some standard atx power supply but since Sam board only use 25W, a pico psu 90W is fully enough, which we use in our Mini Sam configuration..

Forget the AGP graphic card since there is no AGP port and also since Radeon M9 is as fast as a radeon 9250 PCI.

For the 460 processor, you will have to wait many time before it's getting real, and there is no confirmation that it will be supported on Sam 440EP ;)

Thanks, )

Laurent aka Faranheit

@Faranheit

Quote:

I guess you mean that there's no confirmation that there will be a Sam 460. Yes, if you want to run OS 4.1 any time soon, buy a SAM 440ep.

Hans

@Faranheit

I was thinking of adding at least a standard SATA DVD-burner and possibly my old LS120. Wont I need more than 100 W for that?

@Niolator

HD and DVD driver consume somewhere 5-8W per each.

@Niolator

Quote:

1. Yes, in theory. But theres some debate over whether some power supplys can handle the lower power requirement of the Sam. I.e. not enough load to work properly. I got a cheap but nice looking MicroATX case for my Sam440ep and it came with a very quiet 300watt ATX psu. It works perfectly.

2. The Sam440ep has no AGP slot. Only 1x PCI. The Sam440ep-flex coming later this year will have 3x PCI slots, and no onboard graphics.. you'll need to supply your own graphics card (a PCI one) for that mobo. One of the PCI slots is 66mhz too, for optimal performance with your PCI graphics card.

3. The AMCC chip is built into the mobo, so you cant replace it in future. Also, it takes a long time to develop hardware, so I wouldnt wait another year or two for newer hardware, when the 440ep 667mhz does the job just fine for most Amiga tasks!

@Niolator

Here we use a 90W Pico PSU on our Sam with the Mini ITX box with a 2''1/2 harddisk and a slim sata dvd writer.
There is no problem with that.

I have tested with a classic dvd writer (non slim), it works too ;)

See you later ;)
Laurent aka Faranheit

@Faranheit

OK, good to know. That narrows the list of possible "towers" pretty much. That?s good, I would like to have room for a full size PCI card though. I am planning to use my Terratec 22 Producer sound card with it. SAM has a 33 Mhz PCI slot, right?

@Faranheit

Quote:

You?re right. It is practically a Radeon 9250 with 128 bit memory bus the have put in there. There is one advantage with M9 though, it has 3,5x AGP transfer speed in stead of 2x on the AmigaOne. The GPU is marginally slower on M9 952 MPixels/s instead of 960 on Radeon 9250. A Radeon 9200 has 1000 MPixels/s and a Radeon 8500 has 2000.