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AMPM: Alpha Micro Eagle 300 (and Eagle 500)

My favourite Alpha Micro computers are the 68K Eagles -- they're "old enough to be interesting but new enough to be useful," as they say. No, this isn't saying an AM-1000 isn't worthy or able to do useful work, and I have a Commodore 128 next to my POWER9 Talos II, so it's not as if I don't put vintage machines in work environments. However, the Ethernet option on the Eagles is a huge plus, and they're small enough (passing for boring beige box PCs at first glance) to fit into any server room. That's why there's one in mine!

The Eagle 300 is the first of the line, making it a landmark model; these are pictures of the very E300 that is serving you this very page. In addition to its other evolutionary hardware features, the '030 CPU is a big plus and gives great processing oomph -- especially since AMOS works so efficiently even on the lowliest 68000. You can imagine that this box screams by comparison to an AM-1000. It used to be a point-of-sale system for a party store many moons ago, and was a chance find on eBay. It is the first fully functional Alpha Micro system I ever owned personally.

Recently I picked up an Eagle 500, which is an Eagle 300 with a 68040 CPU board, and this unit is the fastest Alpha Micro currently in the shop. It is otherwise the same internally and mostly the same externally and I will include some relevant notes on that also.

For successors to this design, see the Eagle 100 page and the Eagle 450 page.

Pictures

Front of my original Eagle 300 as I first acquired it in 2007. Notice that it resembles an oversized PC tower case, but it has no 3.5" bays (instead it has four 5.25"). The AM-626 tape streamer (actually a Tandberg 3820) and 2GB Seagate Hawk ST31051N drive were factory-installed. The AM-626 takes standard QIC-525 cartridges.

It is unusual given when this particular Eagle was manufactured (1997) that a CD-ROM was not standard equipment ...

... but an external one can be connected easily to the rear SCSI port, and in fact I later installed an Alpha Micro-branded external Toshiba XM-5401B CD-ROM drive (picture at the end), and replaced the AM-626 with an AM-628 (Tandberg 4200) so I could use 2GB cartridges.

There is also an RJ-45 Ethernet port (available also as an AUI port, but they are the same interface), two DB-25 parallel ports, and "eight slots" (actually four, more in a moment). This unit has 16 serial ports installed. There is also a second fan but I did not see this in the E100; that is because the later system has a unified logic board and this system's boards are split (see below).

You can't see it here, but the official model number is AM-3500-E300; all Eagles that I have seen are officially "AM-3500" series models.

Inside view, showing the AM-319 I/O board and the AM-172 CPU board. This dual board design is why there are two fans.

The AM-319 board contains most of the connectors and I/O, as well as the Ethernet NIC, power connectors, front panel logic and connector for an AM-219 floppy interface. It is driven by two main PLDs. The X-BUS connectors to the CPU board are the two beige 34-pin ribbon cables next to the AT power supply connectors. Click the image for a larger view (98K).

The AM-319 has only four slots for serial "SIMM" or "paddlecard" cards, but each card splits into two groups of four ports, so with two slots populated we have our sixteen. The SIMM cards are AM-318-10s, with Super I/O acceleration under AMOS 2.x, and the actual ports are AM-90 Lightning boards which contain built-in surge protection to retard damage to the computer from the terminals connected to it. The AM-319 accepts AM-314, AM-318 and AM-318-10 serial cards. The Eagle 200 AM-319-10 board is a reduced version of this board with no Ethernet, a single parallel port and only two card slots; conversely, the Eagle 550 "Super Eagle" AM-319-20 adds additional parallel and built-in serial ports, and uses larger paddlecards that can support even more serial ports.

The AM-172 CPU board, which comes in the Eagle 300, has several landmarks; the large black one with trim closest to the bottom left corner is the 68EC030, and the chip behind it is the Symbios Logic 53C710 SCSI controller. The top ribbon connector is for SCSI and the two 34-pin ribbon cables on the left are X-BUS. Click the picture for a larger view (116K).

The AM-174-02 CPU board comes in the Eagle 500, which is the same as the Eagle 300 but for this upgrade. This board has a 40MHz 68040, though because one of the '040 clock signals is doubled (even though the chip itself is not internally speed doubled) Alpha Micro billed it as "80MHz" similar to Apple's marketing of the time. This board also has 32K of L2 used as I-cache; AMOS cannot use D-cache for compatibility reasons. It otherwise has the same SCSI controller and connectors to the I/O system board. The Eagle 400 uses the AM-174-00 CPU board, which is 33/66MHz. Click the picture for a larger view (122K).

Up and running at my old apartment, with an AM-65 terminal console at the time.

Later I got it a colour AM-75 console and an external AM-401 CD-ROM (see Potpourri for details on using optical drives with AMOS). Other than having to replace the old AT power supply a few years ago (an off-the-shelf PC AT supply will do) and the side case fan, this machine has been highly reliable. The status LED is visible on the black band along the front of the case and displays a "0" for "no error." The AM-65 is now my spare serial console and is currently connected to the E450.

Performance

Eagle 300

Here is its original benchmark with SI.LIT on standard hardware and the AM-172 68EC030 CPU board, with spinning Seagate 5400rpm SCSI hard disk and DCACHE.SYS enabled in AMOS32.INI.

Computing Index (CX), relative to AM-100: 36.9
48 bit FP Index (4X), relative to AM-100: 36.3
Floating Point Index (FX), relative to AM-100/L: 5.6
Disk Index (DX), relative to ST-506: 15.3

This is dramatically faster than previous systems. In May 2026, I finally got it upgraded to a ZuluSCSI Blaster, supporting 10MB/s on the internal SCSI-2. This, plus a nice fast SanDisk 32GB Ultra SD card, gets ...

Disk Index (DX), relative to ST-506: 41.2

Amazing!

Eagle 500

In May 2026 I also got an Eagle 500, which externally comes in the same case as the Eagle 300 and uses the same AM-319 I/O board, but runs on an AM-174-02 CPU board with a 40MHz ("80MHz") 68040. Alpha Micro offered an upgrade path for E300s to become E500s with a CPU board swap, and this appears to have been one of those computers. Here is its own benchmark, though it came with a Seagate 7200rpm hard disk, and DCACHE.SYS enabled in AMOS32.INI as usual.

Computing Index (CX), relative to AM-100: 83.6
48 bit FP Index (4X), relative to AM-100: 34.1
Floating Point Index (FX), relative to AM-100/L: 1700.0
Disk Index (DX), relative to ST-506: 23.4

That is over twice as fast in general as the E300, and actual FPU instructions blow the E300 out of the water since it has a real 68040 FPU. I upgraded it to a ZuluSCSI Blaster as well, and now the disk index is ...

Disk Index (DX), relative to ST-506: 46.3

What a machine!

Potpourri

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