First I bought the Tetroid Disk Interface when I should have had the Gold Card. Then I ordered the Gold Card and very soon noted that a Super Gold Card clone also existed. Sigh.
Well, after some waiting I now I finally have the ultimate (?) QL add-on, The Super Gold Card.
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| Back: The Super Gold Card. Front: The Gold Card |
Looking at the card, it seems Tetroid has got rid of that old Gold Card INGOT chip. If a replacement has been found this promises there could be a supply of these cards as long as there are people to buy them.
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| Plugged in |
This card is sometimes said to be 3 times faster than the Gold Card, which I felt was about 4 times faster than an unexpanded QL. In crude math the SGC would then be 12 times faster than a standard QL. Let's see...
Fiddling with SuperBASIC, the thought came to my mind: Is this really that much faster than the normal Gold Card?
The experiential, qualitative leap from Gold to Super is not as huge as from the ordinary QL to the Gold Card was. Adding this new speed boost does not give the same feeling as when accelerating the QL the first time.
Having said that, it is clear that when booting up to my environment that copies the QED editor, assembler and source to RAM from the SD card, I can sense the improvement is substantial. Compiling time with QMAC assembler also appeared faster.
So, I did some stopwatch tests on a few BASIC line drawing loops and assembler compiling. I ran the same programs without a card, with GC and the SGC. All the time the QL-SD card reader is present and supplies the Minerva ROM.
A BASIC line drawing program that takes 30 seconds in the non-accelerated QL, took 8.25 seconds with the Gold Card. With Super Gold Card, this was reduced to ~4.5 seconds.
The assembler compilation+linking task that previously took about 5 seconds on GC was now 3 seconds on SGC. I couldn't test the compiling on the unexpanded QL in a comparable way. I guess I could use the Tetroid Disk Interface to get enough memory for that.
These times are not super-accurate, but I'd say in everyday practice the card might be closer to being twice as fast than the Gold Card rather than three. Compared to an unaccelerated QL it's 8 times fast. Possibly the 3x or faster speeds can be achieved in only certain contexts.
Below I have a comparison table between Tetroid Disk Interface, Gold Card clone, Super Gold Card Clone and the QL-SD.
TDI GC SGC QL-SD
Card Reader: YES(CF) NO NO YES(SD)
68000/Acceleration: NO YES 020 NO
Memory: 800K 2MB 4MB NO *)
Disk interface: YES YES YES NO
Battery-backed clock: NO YES YES NO
Toolkit 2: YES YES YES NO
Minerva ROM: NO NO NO YES
*) The file allocation table requires memory
So, I did some stopwatch tests on a few BASIC line drawing loops and assembler compiling. I ran the same programs without a card, with GC and the SGC. All the time the QL-SD card reader is present and supplies the Minerva ROM.
A BASIC line drawing program that takes 30 seconds in the non-accelerated QL, took 8.25 seconds with the Gold Card. With Super Gold Card, this was reduced to ~4.5 seconds.
The assembler compilation+linking task that previously took about 5 seconds on GC was now 3 seconds on SGC. I couldn't test the compiling on the unexpanded QL in a comparable way. I guess I could use the Tetroid Disk Interface to get enough memory for that.
These times are not super-accurate, but I'd say in everyday practice the card might be closer to being twice as fast than the Gold Card rather than three. Compared to an unaccelerated QL it's 8 times fast. Possibly the 3x or faster speeds can be achieved in only certain contexts.
Below I have a comparison table between Tetroid Disk Interface, Gold Card clone, Super Gold Card Clone and the QL-SD.
TDI GC SGC QL-SD
Card Reader: YES(CF) NO NO YES(SD)
68000/Acceleration: NO YES 020 NO
Memory: 800K 2MB 4MB NO *)
Disk interface: YES YES YES NO
Battery-backed clock: NO YES YES NO
Toolkit 2: YES YES YES NO
Minerva ROM: NO NO NO YES
*) The file allocation table requires memory
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