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Re: Good places to buy a large(?) computer - recommandations sough
At 09:24 AM 2/22/96 +0200, you wrote:
>Hello,
>
>Could people send me suggestions/warnings about GOOD places to buy
>a largish computer?
>
>I'm not looking just for the best price, but I also want to buy from
>a relatively reliable place, were I can go back and have things fixed
>if the need arises.
>
>Prefferably in the Tel-Aviv area, but for good places I'd go to other
>areas as well.
>
>The general theme of the configuration is standard medium-high end:
>P100 (PCI)
I heard that you can get Triton II based motherboard in the states. If you
want a highly reliable configuration you might be interested in this,
because the Triton II chipset supports ECC by using normal 36 bit SIMMs
(those with parity).
A Triton II based motherboard should also support up to 1GB of RAM.
The current Triton I based boards do not support parity at all!
>Full tower case
>SCSI controller - the best I can get my hands on
PCI based ofcourse! the price difference between an AHA1542 and a AHA2940 was
around 20%-25% only (here in Israel).
>32Mb (2x16, to leave space for expansion)
>1-2Gb disk (or maybe two 1Gb disks)
If you go for EIDE disks, DO NOT buy WD's 1.2GB disks, because the 1.6GB
disk is much faster, and had (as of 2-3 months ago) the same $/MB ratio, at
least when buying at dealer price directly from E.I.M.
The 1.2GB disk (WDAC31200) was SLOWER than WD's 850MB's drive!
>Good graphics card to support at least 1280x1024 X11
Well, I have a CL5430 based graphics card W/2MB RAM, and a 17" monitor. At
1280x1024 the card can only work at 60Hz refresh rate. (On the other hand it
runs X 100%).
>Optional (if fits into budget): 4x/6x CD-ROM, 2-4Gb DAT
I have an HP1533A DAT, and I'm extremely satisfied with it. It's a DDS2 tape
(4GB native w/DDS2 cassettes) and has hardware compression as well. It seems
that all the other companies as well as HP's older models are running at
180KB/sec, while this tape runs at 500KB/sec.
Since I am not using any SCSI disks, I bought a relatively cheap AHA1522
controller instead of paying x2 or x3 for a PCI based controller.
>I allready own a 17" screen
>I'm not interested in game-kits (soundblaster, very-high-end graphics card)
>
>Thanks for any info
>
>(for those of you who heard me at this position a year ago - this time
>I have the money in hand :)
>
>Cheers,
>
>--Amos
good luck,
Udi