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From: G. Albert Mietus <albert@gamp.hacom.nl>
Subject: Hardware advice for (high end) Home-system needed
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Message-ID: <87ybfnz3lg.fsf@beowulf.gamp.hacom.nl>
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 1996 20:26:50 GMT
Hai all,
I'm running FreeBSD for a few year now, still on my good old 386. It's
becomming a little old and slow now...
So, I'm planning to upgrade: that is almost a new system, only re-using
the screen the keyboard and the mouse.
Once I know which hardware to bay, which brands are good, which are bad.
But, Everthing has changed, so I can use a little bit advice on
brandnames etc.
I'm planning to bay: (see below also)
Big big tower (about 10 disk/tape/... positions)
P133 CPU with mainboard
32 Mbyte RAM
SCSI subsystem:
- SCSI (busmaster) controller PCI card
- reuse "old" disk
- reuse "old" tape drive
- possible about 1G disk
NO IDE
Standard (cheap) "fast" Video card.
Standard floppy disk drive
Standard COM ports etc.
NO or cheap sound support
Ethernet card (10Mb/s, coax)
I don't want to have the fastest, leastest etc stuff. It's old before
you can boot, so I want to go for GOOD and good price/performance.
Any suggestions? Please note I'm planning to spend about 2500 to 3000
dutch gulders. (to compare with "foreign" units: You can get a Compac
presaro. system for that money)
The system will run only FreeBSD, I use X, emacs, gcc and a news
server (Cnews). I never play games.
Some concrete questions:
- I have heard to NCR based SCSI controllers are fast and cheap. TRUE?
- Which cards (brandnames) do have them?
- Are they all alike? Or are some good and some bad.
- Is EDO RAM really faster then normal RAM (for FreeBSD)
- Some PCI ethernet card don't work with FreeBSD (2.1 and later). TRUE?
- Which (brandname) mainborad are good?
- Which are bad?
- How about the "Yellow Dragon"
- How about those "clone" 686 chips, are they supported?
- Are they compatible, faster, slower?
- I never play games, so I don't need high-end videocards. TRUE?
- Is the S3 Trio 64 video card good?
-Is the system realistic, or are parts over/under specified.
That is it, I hope. Please post or mail comments. I will summarize,
when I get usefull info.
Albert ==GAM== Mietus, albert@gamp.hacom.nl.