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From: stesin@elvisti.kiev.ua (Andrew V. Stesin)
Subject: Hardware (VLB) advice needed
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Date: Mon, 14 Nov 1994 01:31:43 GMT
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Hi,

please someone drop me a few words on subj...

I have now 486dx50, 8 Meg RAM with 3 VLB slots in it's MB, 2 of them used:
VLB IDE HDC combined with 2 serial and 1 parralel ports,
and TVGA9400CXI VLB video. The two HDDs are 420M Conner and 120M Seagate.

The problems are:

	a) XFree-2.1 SVGA server leaves the OS (FreeBSD-1.1.5) alive,
	   but console driver locks totally (dark screen, no keyboard
	   response).
	b) When I'm trying to set the ISA bus freq higher than 7.2 MHz
	   (that's the default) it won't perform a stable boot from
	   the hard disk! Some two times from five attempts at 14MHz,
	   three from five at 12MHz... But runs much faster if boots! :)
	c) While having an ethernet (NE2000 ISA clone) I didn't need a
	   flop very often, but today I discovered that the flop refused 
	   to work at all. So I need to do something anyway.

Course, it's a hardware problem, not FreeBSD. But I need an advice 
before starting to solve it... 

I've hear that it's better to have only one VLB
card in 50MHz system, and I'm going to choose between either ISA IDE or ISA
video. But I wonder which one to throw out first? :) Will I lose
much disk performance after changing VLB IDE to ISA one? Or FreeBSD
doesn't takes an advantage of VLB IDE, and cheaper ISA will not be slover,
but less buggy?

From the other point, does X take advantage of VLB video? If the answer
is "yes", I'll leave T9400 inside...

Please, if anyone has an experience of solving such a dilemma, help me!
FAQ's didn't help much... Great thanks in advance!

--

		With best wishes -- Andrew.