First Impressions

A couple of months back I received an email from amigakit inviting me to to order an AmigaONE X1000. I had registered interest in the X1000 some time before and joined the queue for this flagship AmigaOS system. I was disappointed to discover the price had crept up, due to rising CPU prices, with the configuration I wanted now coming in at almost £2300. To be honest I think the long wait also took the shine off the prospect of an X1000 for me. Eventually I contacted amigakit to let them know I was going to pass on the offer and instead decided to take a second look at ACube's AmigaONE 500.

The AmigaONE 500 is a system based on ACube's Sam460ex motherboard. I already have a Sam440flex which I have had a lot of use out of over the last few years, but fancied an upgrade. I decided to order the AmigaONE 500 SSD edition which came in at less than half the price of the X1000. Although not as powerful as an X1000, and perhaps less 'future proof', the difference in cost ultimately swung the decision for me.

The AmigaONE 500 arrived from ACube, who are based Italy, after about a month. As I understand they build the systems to order and I ordered at a busy time for them. Unfortunately it seems the package had taken a few knocks, as the removable side panel had partly come away from the case, leaving one screw lose in the packaging and some bent metal around the other.

Apart from the minor damage, my initial impressions of the quality of the AmigaONE's case are good with it exceeding my expectations and being nice and compact. Apart from the X1000's price tag, the sizeable footprint of it's Fractal case had also put me off a little given the limited space left around my busy desk.

 Once I had the 500 hooked up to my monitor, mouse and keyboard I was pleased to find the system booted quickly straight into a usable Workbench, pre-installed on the SSD by ACube. The retail boxed AmigaOS 4.1 CD-ROM was included as well as an SD card containing the operating system. The system's motherboard features an SD card slot which can be used as a boot device.

I was keen to get the contents of my Sam440flex's 500GB hard drive copied across to the new AmigaONE. I used the utility 'Backup' to update the backup I already had on an external HDD. I ordered the AmigaONE 500 with an SSD rather than a more traditional HDD. SSDs work out more expensive per GB but offer faster access times and silent operation. I know for many SSDs are not an option given the cost per GB, however I was only using about 50GB of the space on my old Sam440flex's HDD (about 30GB of which was a backup of data from elsewhere anyway) so I decided to forfeit the storage space of the HDD in favour of the SSD's faster access times and silent operation.

Copying over data and applications from the external HDD to the AmigaONE was relatively quick and painless. I have been selective and only copied over the applications I use most regularly for now. For most applications it is usually a case of simply dragging and dropping the application's drawer from one drive to the other, although in some cases I've found myself copying across a missing library or two later on. I also copied over some of my favourite third party commodities and tools to the system partition and most of the preferences files from the old setup. This process can be a bit trickier and needs some care as the different hardware of the two systems can been some preferences files, such as for AHI, modes could have unintended consequences if copied across to the new system.

Once all the setup was done I set about trying things out. I've found Workbench to be extremely responsive with drawers opening instantly, as do the various Preferences and Utilities programs. My Sam440flex is no slowcoach when it comes to navigating the Workbench but the AmigaONE 500 is definately faster. So far I've tried loading some big presentations in Hollywood Designer and importing a CD with ADRipper, both these tasks were noticably quicker on the new system.

One disappointing aspect of the AmigaONE 500 is it's graphics performance. I wasn't expecting much from the onboard graphics but had hoped for an experience roughly equivalent to my Sam440flex with it's Radeon 9250. Unfortunately, the AmigaONE 500's onboard graphics cannot deliver the 1920x1080 resolution I was used to or a 32bit colour depth. There was also some graphical corruption here and there, dragging icons and AmiDock being the worse offenders.

On a more positive note ACube provide the new RadeonHD graphics driver with the AmigaONE 500 and I have since picked up a couple of suitable graphics cards from eBay, one of which I finally got round to installing this afternoon, but more on that in my next post!