Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 03:26:40 -0700 From: "Charles Burns" <burnscharlesn@hotmail.com> To: achornback@worldnet.att.net, hanif@ladha.com, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: Some h/w recommendations please... Message-ID: <F176p3R35ocSyXz41jD00001e74@hotmail.com>
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> You're going to want to avoid the P4 unless you've got cash to burn, plain >and simple. If you've gotta stick with Intel, go with a PIII. If AMD is >an >option, look at a Thunderbird or Athlon MP system. I'd wait a while before Note that the expense of the P4 does not mean it is fast. Only the very highest end P4s can beat the .13 micron P3's and Athlons (except in very specific SSE-2 optimized software. Lightwave for Windows comes to mind) P4 is just a bad idea all around at the moment. >investing in an Athlon XP, simply because of the immaturity of the >technology. When you're doing development work, you don't need to be >worrying if the system is crashing because of the hardware or the >development work. Best bet would be something rock solid and dependable >(i.e. the PIII). I would have to disagree a little bit there. The AthlonXP (which is identical to the MP, other than some extra testing that is done to chips sold as "MP") works in most good Athlon motherboards designed for the Thunderbird Athlon, and those are very mature and stable. Additionally, while there are no known issues now, the P3 platform had several very serious stability hangups, whereas the Athlons haven't really had any particularly serious ones (unless you count first generation motherboards from 1998). Iam referring to the i810 MTH hub issue, which made an entire generation of motherboards flaky, and of course the fact that Intel demonstrated that they were willing to forego stability for marketing when they released the 1.13GHz .18 micron P3, which could not compile the Linux kernel without crashing. (See the "Tom's Hardware" article). While that last issue didn't really effect anything much, as very few systems were actually sold, it does show that Intel did release a chip without testing to see if it actually worked. Not a good mark on the record. As far as AthlonXP chips, I generally recommend that people get motherboards that use 100% AMD chipsets (both southbridge and northbridge). Most AMD stability problems that have popped up over the years seem to be from VIA chipsets. While the AMD760 isn't the fastest chipset on earth, and while it has been end-of-life'd by AMD recently, it is mature and reliable. The alternatives are the VIA KT-266A (the fastest available now), the SIS chipset... Which is made by SIS... Which has a horrible track record, and then the NVidia NForce, which is so immature that it doesn't yet actually exist in the form of a buyable product. The VIA KT266A motherboards are almost certainly completely stable. All of the major motherboard manufacturers, including Asus which has their reliability reputation to worry about, have release KT266A motherboards and there are no stability issues with them that I have heard of. I recently built a system with the cheapest one, which was also the first one commercially available (from Gigabyte) and it ran my 72-hour stress test perfectly (looping buildworld + 2 copies of SETI@HOME + some simple floating point and integer "dummy calculation" software that I wrote -- all at once) That is not to say that I would recommend it for a programming workstation, of course. Stable or not, it (the KT266A, not AMD760) is still, as you say, immature. > > RAM: I can definitely afford 256Mb and possibly 512Mb, I think going to > > a 1Gb would be a stretch. > > 512 MB would be a good place to start. > I agree here too. You can get a 256MB DIMM of Crucial registered ECC memory for about USD$37, and unregistered ECC for about USD$34. Even 1GB wouldn't really be that expensive. (ECC would be safest for a system that demands stability. Registered DIMMS would be required to have more than 768MB if you go with 256MB DIMMS--the largest that Crucial (A good place to get quality, CHEAP RAM) makes) Sheesh, my reply is starting to look like LISP. Disclaimer: 4 hours of sleep. Please forgive any stupid things typed inthe last 24hrs. Charles Burns _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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