Re: motherboard
On Mon, 12 May 1997, David B. Teague wrote:
> On Sat, 10 May 1997, Craig Sanders wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 9 May 1997, John Maheu wrote:
> >
> > > I'm in the market for a new motherboard. I want to run a P100 and
> > > eventually a P166. Any suggestions? What about Gigabyte?
>
> I am also in the market for a new motherboard, but I want to run a
> PPro180, a Cyrix, or AMD K6 at 180 MHz (or equivalent). The Cyrix and
> AMD chips are said to be as fast as the PPro for protected mode code,
> and better optimised than the PPro for 16 bit code.
>
> Care to comment?
I run two Cyrix 686s here at home. The rest of the machines here are 486
66s and 100s (also running linux). One P166 in the GA586-HX motherboard,
one P120 in a cheap no-name brand motherboard(*). They run perfectly
with Linux.
You should either get the Cyrix kernel patches (from www.linuxhq.com)
, or install the set6x86 package (from project/experimental on any
debian mirror). Amongst other things, this will enable the cyrix
CPU's suspend-on-halt feature which cuts power consumption (and heat
dissipation!) dramatically. most definitely worthwhile.
(*) i've got to replace this cheap board. This m/b has confirmed my
opinion that the one thing that is really worth paying extra for name
brand is motherboards. It seems to have a weird conflict with the
in-built IDE & Serial controllers. Whenever there's IDE activity, the
mouse goes crazy. apart from that it works ok, so when i upgrade it this
MB will probably just be recycled into a machine which doesn't need a
mouse or serial ports. Also, this machine is dual-boot Win95 & Linux -
under Linux it's very stable. Under Win95 it crashes randomly even when
it's not in use (e.g. leave it on overnight and it will have locked up
or rebooted)....i'm not sure if that's just win95 being buggy or if it's
heat problems caused by win95 NOT doing the sensible thing and using HLT
rather than an idle loop. It could be win95 itself because i've hacked
and fiddled with the machine a lot and it seems to crash a lot less than
it used to.
I hate windows.....I hate having to fight the machine every step of the
way, and I really hate working in the dark with an alleged OS which is
being so 'user-friendly' that it prevents you from finding out what is
really going on. If CorelDraw ever becomes available for Linux, then
win95 goes (even if it's a java app - java is pretty flaky but nowhere
near as bad as win95)
> > i've got a gigabyte 586-hx here. i'd have no hesitation in buying
> > another one.[...]
> > another good board is the Tyan Tomcat III (either single or dual [...]
> > get some more memory) . Costs a little more than the Gigabyte.
>
> Approximately how much do these boards cost? Would you suggest vendors,
> and comment on the service?
no idea. i'm in australia, you're in america.
> I am also concerned about cache. PPro has the L2 cache on board. (I
> think 256K but don't know the precise number) It is _L2_ cache isn't
> it? Is there a better way to find out than ask Intel for sone of their
> advertisements?
my GA586-HX has 512K cache on-board. Capable of caching up to 64MB.
If you get an additinal cache tag ram chip, it can cache up to
512MB. I forgot to get one for mine when i bought it...will get one
one-of-these-days.
some PPros has up to 1MB of L1 cache, I believe...not really sure. I may
be confusing that with one of the upcoming clones about to be released
by cyrix / amd.
> What about cache for the Cyrix and AMD chips?
L2 cache is on the m/b, not on the chip.
craig
--
craig sanders
networking consultant Available for casual or contract
temporary autonomous zone system administration tasks.
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