Date: Tue, 06 Aug 1996 21:00:19 -0700 From: "Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com" <michaelv@HeadCandy.com> To: Kenneth Merry <ken@gt.ed.net> Cc: hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: P6 Natoma chipset Message-ID: <199608070400.VAA21062@MindBender.HeadCandy.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 06 Aug 96 14:41:32 -0400. <199608061841.OAA14299@ulc199.residence.gatech.edu>
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>> I'm going to be buying a 200MHz Pentium Pro and motherboard (probably
>> a dual-CPU) in the next week or two. I know the Orion chipset has
>> some nasty bugs (like the 4MB/s PCI bus speed).
> That particular Orion bug only affected the pre-B0 steppings of the
>chipset. From Rod Grimes: (7/17/96, freebsd-hardware)
>=====
>One more time....
>Chip sets belowing stepping B0 have a PCI bus mastering bug that prevents
>data tranfer rates to reach much beyond 4.4MB/s on the PCI bus. There
>is a fundemental flaw in the design of the chipset/CPU interface logic
>as well, that will never be fixed which has a significant impact on
>CPU/Memory bandwidth.
>=====
Read the last sentence again. Actually, what you quote says that
there is a design deficiency which will never be fixed in the Orion
chipset.
The Orion chipset just makes me nervous... I'll go with the Natoma.
> The SuperMicro P6DNF looks pretty spiffy, too, but I'd rather have
>more PCI slots. (One of the ASUS boards has 5, and the other 6 usable PCI
>slots.) Also, the ASUS boards have NCR SCSI bios, which would be nice to
>have.
I just ordered one. We'll see how spiffy it is in a week or so. :-)
> Has anyone seen the Pentium Pro chips with the 512K L2 cache? The
>only place I've seen them advertised is ALR.
No... I have a feeling they would be obscenely expensive if you could
find them.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael L. VanLoon michaelv@HeadCandy.com
--< Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x >--
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