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From: Gareth McCaughan <gjm11@pmms.cam.ac.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.hardware
Subject: Request for advice
Date: 05 Dec 1996 18:47:01 +0000
Organization: International Pedant Conspiracy
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I'm about to buy a new PC to use as a Unix box. My budget is
limited, and I want a nice monitor, so I'm going to have to
cut some corners. I'd like some advice on what corners I can
cut. I'll be running either a recent Linux or a recent FreeBSD;
advice from either camp is welcome.
First of all, I suppose it matters what I'll be doing with
the machine. It will be my usual machine for tiresome tasks
like mail and news; it will be running an HTTP server, but
I don't expect a very high hit rate; I'll be using it for
programming (in a variety of languages), with all that that
entails; it will get occasional use for symbolic algebra;
and I'll be typesetting papers on it. Probably also reading
them, so I'll be using ghostscript too.
I'm new to the PC world, so my questions may be stupid. Please
be polite if so.
Anyway...
- Memory. My guess is that I could survive uncomfortably
with 16Mb and would be reasonably comfortable with 32.
With prices where they are at the moment, this doesn't
seem a sensible corner to cut. Right?
- Memory again. If I don't get parity memory, am I really
seriously going to regret it? How common are memory errors
these days?
- CPU. Any compelling reason to choose Intel over Cyrix/IBM?
I'm contemplating the 6x86 P166+, which seems to be very
well placed in price/performance. I don't expect to be
spending all my time doing simulations or solving differential
equations, or anything else that would require a lot of FP oomph.
- Motherboard. How much difference does HX make over VX?
What about differences between manufacturers? Presumably
the main difference there is in reliability rather than
speed? Any manufacturers I should be avoiding?
- Video card. What's the cheapest thing that will do, say,
1280x1024 at 8bpp and 1152x900 at 16bpp? What if I want
to be able to go higher than that? (1600x1200 at 8bpp?)
I've had prices quoted at me for systems including a
"Diamond Stealth 2Mb 64 DRAM" (but, aargh, which chipset?)
and an "S3 ViRGE 3D VGA card", which sounds a bit vague.
How are these likely to perform? Should I just forget it
and get a Millenium?
- Network card. I don't expect ever to be getting higher
data rates across the network than, say, 200Kbytes/sec;
does this mean I can get away with a cheapo NE2000 clone?
Are there likely to be big compatibility problems here?
Thanks for any advice. I'll try to follow things in these groups
(NB: anything Linux-specific or FreeBSD specific should probably
go in only one of the newsgroups), but it would be helpful if
you could mail me too.
--
Gareth McCaughan Dept. of Pure Mathematics & Mathematical Statistics,
gjm11@dpmms.cam.ac.uk Cambridge University, England.