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Date:      Fri, 16 Jun 2000 13:01:14 -0700
From:      Kent Stewart <kstewart@3-cities.com>
To:        "Craft, Paul" <PCraft@mail.dos.state.fl.us>
Cc:        "'freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG'" <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: How much machine do i need?
Message-ID:  <394A878A.E6E63040@3-cities.com>
References:  <413062A3EA92D3118535009027D619980A5B7D@postsprung.dos.state.fl.us>

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"Craft, Paul" wrote:
> 
> I have some older pentium 90 and 120 machines laying around.  Would one of
> them support FreeBSD while I test drive it.  If not, what are the minimums
> for hardware?

If you follow -stable or -questions, you will find a lot of people
running systems of this vintage. Some have hardware problems because
of things such as flaky or buggy HD controllers.

The real problem is what do you expect the system to do. A P90 running
x-windows with 16MB of memory will be a long ways down on the
performance chart. X needs around 48MB and I wouldn't try it on a
system with less than 64MB. I ran a P133 for a long time as my main
FreeBSD server, which was also my gateway to the Internet. It had 64MB
of memory and appeared to run X faster than it did Windows 98. I only
ran x for some things and most stuff I did from the command line.
Everything but a system build on a P133 is pretty fast from the
command line :). The motherboard was flaky and I couldn't add any more
memory. It was eventually upgraded to a Celeron 433. Some things run
much faster now. Memory bound processes didn't change that much. They
were both on a 66MHz FSB and continued to run that speed. One used EDO
memory and the other was SDRAM and that difference in speed was
sizeable. A Celeron 433 runs around 6x faster than a P133 but I never
saw that difference because I couldn't get my data to the cpu 6x times
faster.

Freebsd is fun to use.

Kent

-- 
Kent Stewart
Richland, WA

mailto:kstewart@3-cities.com
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