Re: Hardware?

[" Raymond A. Ingles" <inglesra@frc.com>]

On Wed, 7 Oct 1998, Michael Meskes wrote:

> I'm about to buy a new machine and wonder for which hardware to go. It won't
> be an expensive machine so I consider a cheap 3D AGP graphics card but
> wonder which one can be used under X.

 In addition to looking at commercial solutions like Xi and Metro-X, you
can take a look at the XFree86 web pages. Take a look at:

http://www.xfree86.org/FAQ/index.html#SectionF  -- chipset support


> Also what's the better buy for the
> money, Pentium II or K6 II?

 Hard to say. In terms of bang-for-buck, K6's are *much* better - you get
about the same performance for *much* less money.

 There are a couple snags, though - the K6's FPU (floating-point math
unit) is slower than the PII's. Unless you do scientific calculations, or
raytracing, or something like that, you won't really notice a difference.
Also, the K6 uses a Socket-7 motherboard, and many of those don't support
a 100MHz bus speed. A faster bus is *always* desirable.

 Take a look at Tom's Hardware Guide for a lot of information about this:

http://www.tomshardware.com/

 (It also has a pretty good section on video cards...)

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles          (248) 377-7735      ray.ingles@fanucrobotics.com

 "One man's 'magic' is another man's 'engineering'. 'Supernatural' is
                 a null word." - Robert Heinlein