13 Conclusion

Contents of this section

If you have some moneny to put into your machine, you'd be well off with a Pentium90, ASUS-SP4, which is what I use at the moment. If you can afford 32M RAM that would be much better than 16M RAM.

Real soon now the upcoming standard will be the Triton Chipset with support for special SIMMS called EDODRAM, which has cache on the SIMM and does not require any external cache anymore. At the time of writing (29th of March 95) this is fairly new and will evolve a lot, but you could expect more than a 30 percent increase in performance. The PCI Mach64 ATI-GUP-Turbo (not the cheaper GUP-Turbo-Windows) would be a good choice, with 4M RAM you can have truecolor in higher resolutions. It is well supported in the XFree86(tm)-3.1.1, and there are commercial X-Servers available of which I'd recommend Accelerated/X by Roell, which supports the Mach64 very well and fast. For SCSI I'd take the DPT rather than the (much cheaper and very fast) NCR53c810 in case you plan to use SCSI-Tapes a lot. The NCR53c810 driver on Linux does lack disconnect/reconnect support, thus blocking the SCSIbus on operations like "mt rewind", "mt fsf" etc. It bears a performance penalty on tar-operations

If you do not want to spend that much money on computer equipment (e.g.: you are having a life) you might go for an ASUS-SP3-SiS with AMD-DX2/66 or DX4/100. The SPEA V7 Mirage P64 PCI with 2M VRAM would be a good choice, since it uses the Trio64 S3 Chip, which is well supported by XFree86(tm)-3.1.1, quite cheap to buy and fast, too.

Intel Premiere-II (aka Plato) motherboard, and the number-nine GXE64Pro. Since I don't have that much money I'd opt for a 486 on the new ASUS-486-PCI-SP3-G Board with the saturn-chipset rev. 4. and the PCI-ATI-GUP Mach32 with 2M VRAM. I can use x-window in 16bpp or 8bpp (64K colors or 256 colors) in accelerated mode that way. Since the mach64 is not supported yet I would not recommend buying it for the time being. The current linux-kernels seem to have some problems with this ASUS-486-PCI-SP3-g board with PCI-to-Memory-posting enabled, but the system is still very fast when disabling that feature. If you come across a 486-board which works with all PCI-features enabled, please let me know.

Another fine card since XFree86(tm)-3.1 is the fast and cheap et4000/w32-PCI-card.

So whatever mainboard you buy, you should get one with the NCR53c810-SCSI-chip on board. It is unbeatable in its price/speed.

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