Re: New machine spec: any comments?
On Fri, 14 Aug 1998, Christopher Barry wrote:
> As for the 512 vs. 1GB of RAM question, unless you purchase Pentium II
> XEON processors, it is supposed to be not practical to use more than
> 512MB in a Pentium II system because they can not cache more than that.
> And since nearly all PII motherboards have 4 DIMM slots at most, and the
> price of 256MB sticks is 4 times that of 128MB sticks. Unless the
> workstation REALLY needs more than 512MB it's obviously not
> price/performance effective to go with 1GB, especially considering that
I built a system with 1.0Gbytes of ram last month. It is a -real- pain to
find a mother board that supports it. Almost all the vendors claim they
can do it and almost none of them can. We found out that SuperMicro boards
can do it and I've heard rumors that some Tyan boards can too. We found
that many boards simply would not boot with the DIMMS while other boards
would boot but wouldn't cache the upper .5GB
The machine had a Intel PII-350 with the 440BX chipset. The ram was 4
sticks of double height double sided 100MHZ PC100 SDRAM. The MB had an
onboard 7895 dual channel SCSI controller and maybe a sound card too.
I think the cost of the ram alone was about 1.2k$ cdn, the board was about
300-400$ cdn and the chip was about 1k$cdn. We also bought a 9.0GB Quantum
Atlas II SCA-3 disk (1k$ cdn), a 3G IDE (~200$cdn) and a Fujitsu MO drive
(500$ cdn).
QNX worked OK with the gig of ram, Win95 crashed instantly on boot and
linux didn't want to use more than about 800 (2.0.34).
Jason
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