Date: Wed, 24 May 1995 03:27:15 -0700 From: William Maddox <maddox@CS.Berkeley.EDU> To: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.org Subject: Proposed p90 hardware configuration Message-ID: <199505241027.DAA14196@redwood.CS.Berkeley.EDU>
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I am about to buy a P90 system to run FreeBSD. My intention is to put
together a reasonably high-performance and well-balanced system using
proven, well-regarded components. I insist on parity memory, and thus
have disqualified Triton-based systems, despite their performance
edge. At current S.F. bay-area discounted prices, the following
system can be put together for approximately $5000. I have put these
specs out for quotations from several local dealers, and expect to
plunk down the money in the next week or so.
Intel Pentium 90
Micronics M54Pi motherboard w/256k cache,
(Intel Neptune chipset, Phoenix BIOS)
16 Mb DRAM (2 x 72-pin 8Mb 60ns SIMMs w/parity)
Adaptec 2940 PCI Fast SCSI-II host adapter
Hewlett-Packard 3724 1.2Gb 9.5ms 3.5" disk drive w/512k cache
Hewlett-Packard 35470 2Gb 4mm DAT
Toshiba XM3601B 4x CDROM
#9GXE64 PCI graphics accelerator w/ 2Mb DRAM
Nokia 447x 17" .25mm dot-pitch Trinitron Monitor
Teac 1.44 Mb 3.5" floppy drive
Lexmark (IBM) 101-key keyboard
Logitech First Mouse 3-button serial mouse
PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 300 power supply
PC Power and Cooling Solid-Steel Mini-Tower case w/ 2nd cooling fan
Heatsink and fan for P90 chip
MS-DOS 6.2x (for diagnostics, setup utilities, DOOM, etc.)
Can anyone find any obvious faults with this?
I chose the HP drives purely on the strength of HP's reputation and
warranty. I would be interested in hearing if anyone has had
experience, good or bad, with HP SCSI products and the AHA2940 SCSI
host adapter using either the FreeBSD or the Linux drivers. Is anyone
using an HP DAT drive? I seem to hear the WangDAT mentioned more
often, and specifically avoided it because it is on the rogue list
in the FreeBSD driver source.
The choice of the #9 GXE64 2Mb DRAM (S3-864) is almost a shot in the
dark, and perhaps a timid one. I chose a #9 product primarily because
the X-Inside folks claim to work very closely with #9, which means I
should be able to expect good support if I go the Accelerated-X route.
Unfortunately, the faster GXE64 Pro model (VRAM) apparently has a
design misfeature with its programmable clock that even X-Inside has
not been able to work around. Diamond looks good from a performance
perspective, and I have seen the Stealth-64 2Mb VRAM (S3-964) selling
locally for almost same price as the #9GXE64 2Mb DRAM. Unfortunately,
it seems that Diamond keeps changing their designs faster than the
X-server support can keep up: As I understand it, Diamond has been
shipping Stealth64 DRAM boards with a new RAMDAC that XFree86 doesn't
support properly. There is also a new Diamond board called the
Stealth 64 Video VRAM using the S3-968 and supported by no one, but
both XFree86 and X-Inside promise support "real soon now". From
reading the newsgroups, I get the impression that all of the video
card makers diddle their designs constantly, and you often have little
idea what RAMDAC or clock generator you are getting when you buy a
specific model card. I would greatly appreciate hearing from *anyone*
who is a fully-satisfied user under XFree86 of a recently-acquired
video card, so that I might have a chance of finding a board with
exactly the same graphics chip, RAMDAC, and clock generator. I would
like to run 1152x900 and 1280x1024 at 8bpp and at least 70 hz refresh.
I am mainly interested in GUI graphics, not CAD, image processing, or
multimedia. How solid are the ATI products?
Thanks for any info,
William Maddox
maddox@cs.berkeley.edu
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