Date: Fri, 22 Dec 1995 10:08:07 -0800 From: David Greenman <davidg@Root.COM> To: Rashid Karimov <rashid@rk.ios.com> Cc: mcw@hpato.aus.hp.com (M C Wong), freebsd-questions@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: Giga-Byte GA586ATED board any good ? Message-ID: <199512221809.KAA00159@corbin.Root.COM> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 22 Dec 95 12:01:23 EST." <199512221701.MAA13325@rk.ios.com>
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>> Giga-Byte board, and the above model in particular ? >> >> Thanks in advance. > > Go for the Number 1: > ASUS started making P6 MBoards - and oh boy do they look impressive. > I've ordered one( after jkh@ did it :)) and waiting for it to arrive > in few days. > In few words - it's P6 up to 200Mhz , up to 512Mb or RAM ( no more > 128Mb) limit and cache memory will cover the whole range - not like > first 64 M only with Triton based MBs. > > The price is something around $2K for the MB with the processor > at 150Mhz - which is about 2 times more comparing to ASUS P55TP4Xe > with P133 and 256K cache - but it's definitely worth it :) A couple of corrections: Unless Jordan forgot to tell me something, he didn't order a P6 motherboard from ASUS. ...but I did and it's sitting a few feet away. It's what wcarchive is going to be made out of in the near future. The price you have above is wrong - the motherboard *alone* was $2300 and the CPU chip was $2100 - combined total is $4400. It's true that it's about 2-3 times faster than a high end P5, and it's true that it also supports up to 512MB of memory...BUT, all four SIMMs have to be the same size/type, there are only 4 SIMM slots, and the parity/ECC is currently broken (the MB is shipped with it permanently disabled). It also has poor PCI DMA write performance due to the fact that the PCI DMA write buffer is disabled. The PCI buffer is broken in some revs of the Orion chipset so the buffer is permanently disabled in the BIOS. It also insists on testing/probing all of memory even on warm-boots. With 256MB of memory, it takes about 4 minutes to reboot because of this - very annoying if you're doing development with the machine (like I am currently). I wouldn't recommend this motherboard until some of the problems have been dealt with. Everything should be fixed by February or March of next year, however. -DG
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