From owner-freebsd-questions Fri May 2 21:34:58 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id VAA11642 for questions-outgoing; Fri, 2 May 1997 21:34:58 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mixcom.mixcom.com (mixcom.mixcom.com [198.137.186.100]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id VAA11637 for ; Fri, 2 May 1997 21:34:53 -0700 (PDT) Received: by mixcom.mixcom.com (8.6.12/2.2) id XAA21560; Fri, 2 May 1997 23:37:21 -0500 Received: from p75.mixcom.com(198.137.186.25) by mixcom.mixcom.com via smap (V1.3) id sma021555; Fri May 2 23:37:08 1997 Message-Id: <3.0.32.19970502233645.00b04364@mixcom.com> X-Sender: sysop@mixcom.com X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Pro Version 3.0 (32) Date: Fri, 02 May 1997 23:36:46 -0500 To: "Ian Vaudrey" From: "Jeffrey J. Mountin" Subject: Re: What to buy? Cc: , Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-questions@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk At 12:38 PM 5/2/97 +0100, Ian Vaudrey wrote: >> 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. Not just floating point, which they really lag behind Intel on, but normal numeric processing, they are somewhat slower. One reason why I won't touch them. >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. Hmmm... does this mean they can be set to 2.5 bus speed now? --snip-- >> 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. A 16X Toshiba SCSI can be had for just under $200, but I don't see why one would need such speed. "Wow! You can install fast!" and playing CDROM games, but that's 95. >> 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. Best to go with several smaller drives and spread disk IO around. >> SCSI Tape Drive (Seagate?) > >Travan? No experience of these, so no comments. FYI, Seagate has DATs and they are basically the Archive Pythons, which I like and I believe they were bought out by Conner in the middle Archive Python -> Conner -> Seagate This kinda stuff makes me dizzy. --snip-- ------------------------------------------- Jeff Mountin - System/Network Administrator jeff@mixcom.net MIX Communications Serving the Internet since 1990