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Hardware choices
Hi,
Some time ago I posted a hardware question and promised to summarize the
information I get and post it back.
So, here are the conclusions I reached from the tips of several people
on this list, plus reading many more hardware docs than I had ever
planned to...
I) Cyrix
Cyrix 6x86 seems a reasonable choice for people who want both good
performance and a good price. From what I managed to find out, it is
currently well supported, and is pretty stable under linux.
It has two main problems:
1. Although many boards support it, few, if any, _GOOD_ boards that
support it (such as the Tyan Tomcat I for example) are imported to
Israel.
2. It's FPU is poor, compared to the respective pentiums. This should
not bother most of the people, but since I mainly need it for pure
number-crunching, this rulled it out for me.
II) MotherBoard
For the Pentium family - one of the best boards currently available
seems to be the Asus P/I-P55T2P4. It's based on the 430HX PCIset, and
Rev. 3.0 is said to support bus speeds of up to 83MHz. Rated first at
many MB benchmarks, including under Linux.
It is the standard PCI Board currently sold by Ligad, and the retail
price for it is around $220.
By the way, it does NOT support Cyrix, but does support AMD, if that
interests anyone ;-)
For the PPro, Asus P/I-P6RP4 (450KX based) seems to be a very good
choice. It is currently not imported to Israel, but I'm negotiating with
Ligad about bringing it. Anyone interested?
For specifications of the Asus boards, look at:
http://asustek.asus.com.tw/Products/spec.html
For excellent general hardware information, including detailed
explanations and various benchmark results, try
http://sysodc.pair.com
Tuvik
--
______________________________
Tuvik Beker
E-mail: becket@shum.huji.ac.il
Tel : 972-3-5711685
Fax : 972-3-7322106
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