Well, since so many people seem to discourage the use of Athlon CPU's, here's my
affordable alternative...
Take a look at the specs for the Abit BP-6 mobo. It's a dual socket 370 (Celeron
only) motherboard with a built in PCI ATA/66 channel on top of the standard
ATA/33 one (meaning you can throw in 8 IDE devices). The motherboard is only
slightly more expensive than a generic PII mobo (or at least it was when I
bought it) and the cost of an extra celeron CPU is really not much of an issue.
I have a computer running on this for like 4 months now, and I have no problem
with it whatsoever, except for the fact that it sometimes hardlocks in X, but I
guess that must be some sort of problem related to some hardware
incompatibility, or some kernel misconfiguring on my side.
And _do_ be careful when picking a video card for the box you're buying
(regardless if you're willing to go with this mobo, or an AMD-based one); don't
make the same mistake I did when buying a TNT-2 instead of a Voodoo-3. Although
the TNT-2 is superiour in hardware-terms, 3dFx's superior drivers (and nVidia's
lack of even remotely acceptable drivers) kind of reverses that situation when
gaming under linux.
Now, what can I say about my box? Well... It runs 2 seti@homes permanently, and
still has the horsepower to let me work in X comfortably. I can still throw in a
resource-hungry app without even noticing it, where a single CPU machine would
simply choke on it. Now all I need is more RAM so I won't hit as much swap when
doing heavy stuff on my machine.
On Feb 24 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Tom,
>
> I'm facing a similar situation. I decided against the Athalon for the
> same reasons listed. I was going for the k6-450 until I found out they
> have problems with the tri-level cache.
>
> I finally settled on the Tyan 1590s because of the 8 slots and
> upgradeablity; K6-500 and 160 P-100 RAM. I decided to try the Diamond
> S3Virge AGP/8mg since I had good luck with the PCI version, and I'm not
> a gamer.
>
> All I need is a good Linux box and I think I'll have it when I'm
> finished. At the very least it should be faster than my 200MMX. Maybe.
>
> Pj
>
--
Rial Juan <http://nighty.ulyssis.org>
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Belgium tel: (++32) 89/856533
ulyssis system admininstrator <http://www.ulyssis.org>
Unix IS user-friendly. It's just not ignorant-friendly
or idiot-friendly.
----------------------------------------------------------
Sign the petition at http://www.libranet.com/petition.html
Help bring us more Linux Drivers
