Date: Fri, 2 May 1997 12:38:40 +0100 From: "Ian Vaudrey" <ivaudrey@test.nemko.ltd.uk> To: <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org> Cc: <mjanosi@numacorp.com> Subject: Re: What to buy? Message-ID: <199705021141.MAA07672@mail.nemko.ltd.uk>
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> From: Miki Janosi <mjanosi@numacorp.com> > To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org > Subject: What to buy? > Date: 01 May 1997 22:00 > > I want to buy a machine specifically for FreeBSD. I have version > 2.1.0 but plan on buying a new CD of the latest version. And I'd like > some tips. This is what I plan on buying. > > Cyrix 6x6 +200 motherboard The Cyrix processors are reputedly very quick, with the exception of a lousy floating point unit. What would worry me is the power requirements, at around twice that of the nearest equivalent Intel part. This means more stress on the power supply and motherboard, and for that matter the higher ambient temperature in your box might not exactly be welcome news to your other components. AFAIK, motherboards supporting the 75MHz clock required by the Cx686-200 are still pretty thin on the ground. At least one MB that does support this seems to have reliability problems of it's own - check out the Supermicro newsgroup if you have news access. In short, you might want to ask yourself what is more important to you, speed or stability. If you decide on the latter, I'd personally opt for an AMD K5 running on a GigaByte 586HX motherboard. This combination is rock solid and still pretty quick. If you really need more speed and funds allow, consider Pentium Pro. > 2940 Adaptec SCSI controller There have been several reports on this list of driver problems with this board. On the other hand, list members consistently report that the NCR/Symbios 800 series equivalents have no such problems and are just as quick, while being considerably cheaper. > 16x CD-ROM IDE (Mitsumi?) Again, there have been several reports on this list of problems with IDE CDROMs. I'd go for SCSI. You'd probably get much the same throughput from a decent 8x SCSI drive as from a 16x IDE unit in any case. > 8 GB SCSI HD (Seagate?) I've no experience of Seagate SCSI drives, but I've had several of their IDE drives fail. The high failure rate of Seagate units has also been reported on recently in Computer Shopper (UK). I use Fujitsu SCSI drives in my servers with no failures to date. > SCSI Tape Drive (Seagate?) Travan? No experience of these, so no comments. > Video Card Matrix Mellanium 8MB Ditto. I assume you'll be running X, in which case it would probably be a good idea to check with the XFree-86 mailing list. > Sound Blaster No problems AFAIK > > I have an agreement that if I can't get the hardware to work with > FreeBSD I can swap till I get it to work! Please send responses to my > e-mail address since I got my WWW connection taken away and then had > to quit the mailing list because of bosses orders. > --------------------------------------------------------- > Miki Janosi NUMA Corporation, Akron, OH > Tel: (330) 925-5000 x.455 email: mjanosi@numacorp.com As a sysadmin solid, reliable boxes make me happy. You may well have different requirements, and this is of course just my two cents. - Ian
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