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Date:      Tue, 11 Aug 1998 09:10:39 +0100
From:      Manar Hussain <manar@ivision.co.uk>
To:        "Gregory P. Smith" <greg@nas.nasa.gov>
Cc:        Omar Thameen <omar@clifford.inch.com>, freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: cpu/motherboard recommendations 
Message-ID:  <3.0.5.32.19980811091039.0084b5b0@stingray.ivision.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <199808102341.QAA19134@ryouko.nas.nasa.gov>
References:  <Your message of "Mon, 10 Aug 1998 18:44:54 EDT."             <19980810184454.A16048@clifford.inch.com>

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>I always recommend non-Intel (my personal bias).

Tha's pretty much where we tend to sit too :)

>The AMD K6-2 option will be a cheaper for the 100Mhz bus speed (the
>important thing for a server; good I/O..).  Keep in mind that the only
>PII with 100Mhz bus speed is the expensive 400Mhz option.  I'm sure

If you're mainly after a 100Mhz bus with a decent CPU then the AMD will
probably win as it's much cheaper than a PII solution so I'd agree there -
but you don't need to get a 400Mhz PII to get a 100Mhz bus, you can get it
with a 350Mhz PII. If CPU performance is very important and worth a fair
premium then go for 400 Mhz PII. One of the things I like about the AMDs is
that I get a wider choice of motherboards. For example - it wounds like
this is the kind of machine that you plan to put a lot of RAM into - you
thus need to make sure that the second level cache covers all this RAM.

If I were in the US I'd be very tempted by the AMD K6-2 with the California
Graphics Photon 100 HC motherboard which has a 2Mb second level cache
option that will let it cache pretty much up to 1/2 Gb of RAM (see
http://www.anandtech.com/reviews/motherboards/california_graphics/photon100h
c-1mb-atx.html) - alas these are difficult to get in the UK at the moment :(

There are AMDs with better on-chip cache options due out relatively soon.

Manar

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