I've currently got a total of 2MB in my 3000 and looking at buying the ZorRAM expansion until such time can find a suitable accelerator card with it's own memory. I understand this type memory is slower than conventional motherboard Ram because of limitations imposed across the Zorro bus, has anyone got experience with this card, even with just the standard 030@25Mhz in my 3000 will I a notice a performance hit?

I never owned a A3000, but I thought the full 2MB is configured as CHIP RAM? If so, that ram is quite slow as the CPU has to compete with the custom chips, so the ZorRAM expansion would probably help.

I'm not so sure even if the FAST RAM on the MB is that much faster than the ZorRAM... but even if it is, as long as you have the memory priority set correctly, you won't experience any slowdown until you use up that RAM and start using the slower RAM.

I had a A2000 with 32MB 32bit RAM on an PP&S 040 accelerator, and 4MB of 16bit RAM on a GVP 4008 controller card. The controller RAM helped the SCSI do DMA or something(GURU ROM), and I had the priority set so that it did not adversely effect performance...

When I first got the accelerator it had only 8MB of ram, and once I exceeded that and started into the 4MB (on Z-II bus which is worse) the system really did slow down.

Motherboard RAM should be expanded first, it's a bit faster. Instead of adding 32 pcs. 1Mx4 ZIP RAMs you could also use a PS/2 SIMM adapter - the RAMs you'll probably get for free.

Unless you're going to add an accelerator card - you should always max the RAM on that before using anything else.

Thanks for all the reply's, I think for my current setup the ZorRAM is the way to go.

I was thinking to get one too, sometimes is cheaper to get that then the ZIP rams.
I think it would be perfect with MAC emulation.

With all the Amiga kit you have listed, why emulate a Mac?

I got few reasons:
Photoshop, Painter, Illustrator
Games, like Marathon

Except Dude, the ZorRam allocates 256MB of auto config space from the system, regardless of memory on board; so you are paying for a full pizza, but only get half to eat. In the real world, that lost 128MB is address space that can't be used for another card or device. So you are SOL if you need it; you might as well get the whole thing. Or get a Mediator with a Radeon 9200 and use its memory as system memory

Z3 AutoConfig space is 1.75 GiB - don't think you can expect this to get crowded anywhere soon...