Amiga Power Supply Battle: Commodore vs Electroware

[@mk500]

Interesting findings. Thanks for taking the time to do such a careful test.

[@saxxonpike]

Surprised to see that the original Amiga 500 power supply is so light - the C64 one I have by contrast is a real heavy brick.

[@root42]

That's because the C64 one is basically a linear supply. A huge transformer coupled with a small linear voltage regulator.

[@EgonOlsen71]

There are heavier versions of these as well, which also have a huge transformer in them. Not sure how these compare to the lighter ones though.

[@root42]

Which also explains the size of the case. Mine is mostly empty space…

[@Shmbler]

Nice comparison. There's quite a few different A500 PSU models though. I have both a switching and a transformer model. Looking at the board, I think even the transformer model doesn't do simple linear regulation for 5V. Also, I wonder how much the ripple varies with the current. Because I suspect that different A500 revisions have huge differences in power consumption. I think Rev 5 and below have 16 NMOS DRAM chips, while Rev 6 and higher use 4 CMOS chips. Same applies to the different 512k trapdoor expansions. From my experience, older NMOS chips get much warmer during operation. So I would expect that a Rev 5 draws significantly more current on 5V than a Rev 6. I don't think anyone made a vid on that topic yet ;-)

[@root42]

If you start to go down the PSU rabbit hole: it is VERY deep. I think I barely scratched the surface!