Re: Cheap hardware for
>> I was thinking Pentium100-166, 64 megs of SDRAM, and SCSI would be a
>> good way to go -- are there any relatively inexpensive motherboards
>> with these sorts of reqs that someone might recommend?
Hi!
These days P166MMX or P200MMX are rather cheap (relatively cheaper than
P100-166 if you find them anywhere anymore new that is). Simple ATX case +
cheap, but good MB (QDI, Asus or some..) is the way to go. Unfortunately almost
all new motherboards have that nasty 64MB limit with cache, only alternative is
VIA-chipset based MB's or PPro or PII. K6 or Cyrix compared speed to $ are not
bad if you don't need that much fpu. The processor prices are dropping all the time,
so byu after an drop and don't wait long .. or wait till the next drop.
OTOH a BAT case + MB that cost very little and is what I would call 'good'
might go as well. It seems to be that all the new MB's are ATX form, so upgrading
might require new case in the future, but OTOH when upgrading, why not upgrade
the case also...
>> Also, I need a fairly cheap XFree86-compat graphics card. Doesn't need
>> to be fancy or a speed deamon, but I'd like to be able to do 1280x1064
>> on occaison.
If you can get an older Millenium or newer Mystique cheap, then that is a good choise.
Also ATI has some good and cheap boards. Just be sure to use newest X servers.
ATI for example seems to be pushing faster new versions of their chips and
boards to market, than they can write good drivers..
or I'm just stumbling to all the bugs..
As for SCSI controllers Asus has the SC875 which is based on Symbios/NCR
53C875 chip - cheap and well supported. UW controller for the price half of an
narrow Adaptec 2940. About any board based on the Symbios/NCR chip is a
good choise.
However if you're going to use only one disk, then EIDE disks are cheaper and
in some cases faster. If you're using 2 disks consider SCSI and with 3 disks go
with SCSI. IBM disks are good choises in any case, but they're not the cheapest.
I did some *very* quick test with one IBM 6,4BG UDMA-ide disk and 4,3GB UW
SCSI disk and the ide disk was a *little* faster. This was on a system with Intel
VS440FX mb, Ppro 180, 64mb, *No UDMA*, Adaptec 2940UW, disks with 1 GB
partition in the front of the disk.
I had an setup with an 3,6GB ide disk and four older SCSI disk (0,5GB-1GB) with
swap partitions and /var, /usr and so on spread evenly. Then I sold the SCSI adapter
and moved the whole system to that one IDE drive.. the whole system became slow
as (beep) . I just installed an new adapter and tonight it's time for some
raid-experimentations :).
--j
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