From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Jun 7 07:34:35 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id HAA18881 for questions-outgoing; Fri, 7 Jun 1996 07:34:35 -0700 (PDT) Received: from persprog.com (persprog.com [204.215.255.203]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id HAA18853; Fri, 7 Jun 1996 07:34:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: by persprog.com (8.7.5/4.10) id JAA14090; Fri, 7 Jun 1996 09:24:37 -0500 Received: from novell(192.2.2.201) by cerberus.ppi.com via smap (V1.3) id sma014088; Fri Jun 7 10:24:18 1996 Received: from NOVELL/SpoolDir by novell.persprog.com (Mercury 1.12); Fri, 7 Jun 96 10:20:40 +0500 Received: from SpoolDir by NOVELL (Mercury 1.12); Fri, 7 Jun 96 10:20:17 +0500 From: "David Alderman" Organization: Personalized Programming, Inc. To: "Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com" , questions@freebsd.org, freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1996 10:20:10 EST Subject: Re: Which dual Pentium motherboard? Cyrix SMP? CC: GEORGE@novell.persprog.com, RDR@novell.persprog.com Priority: normal X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Windows (v2.31) Message-ID: <26C84A7DC0@novell.persprog.com> Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > >I've heard that mixing EISA/PCI can be a "headache"? > > Actually, EISA and PCI are a very naturual mix, since they are similar > in a lot of ways. The only problem with it is they charge waaay too > much money for it. > > I've heard the thing to avoid is PCI+VLB, not EISA. > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Michael L. VanLoon michaelv@HeadCandy.com > EISA/PCI is fine, unless your floppy contoller is on an EISA card. We recently migrated an old EISA 486/66 to a newer Pentium motherboard. Because of availability problems (and this was an emergency) we obtained an ASUS Neptune-based EISA/PCI board rather than their new Triton-2 board. Unfortunately, the floppy contoller was part of the EISA SCSI card and despite carefully pre-building an EISA boot disk with the necessary config files from both the new motherboard and the old peripherals. The machine refused to recognize the floppy on the EISA card. Putting in an ISA floppy controller to run the config solved the problem. The system administrator and her assistant took 20+ hours to do the upgrade (there was also a hard disk replacement involved with a backup and restore). Moral of the story: EISA/PCI is fine as long as the floppy controller is on the motherboard. Does anybody know the cost of the new ASUS PCI/EISA board? ====================================== When philosophy conflicts with reality, choose reality. Dave Alderman -- dave@persprog.com ======================================