What you do depends on how much money you want to spend and what you
want to learn. With that caveat here is some info to help your decision
process.
The Celeron clock is tied to the bus clock speed. If the 500 Mhz
celerons have a 66 Mhz bus clock then if you try to set the bus speed to
100 Mhz you will be overclocking the celerons to 750 and they won't
clock 750. You could try the 400's with a BIG heat sink and fans. They
could overclock. I personally have a pair of 366 celerons on an abit
bp-6 board overclocking at 550 with the agp bus ratio set to 2/3 which
puts the 2x agp slot at 66Mhz which its happy to do. This also does not
affect the pci bus speed which you must not try to overclock. That would
be a disaster, unless of course what you want to learn about is how
sensitive the pci bus is to overclocking. There are some databases
(www.overclockers.com) that will help you with the decision as to which
clock speed celeron to use. If you do not want to overclock, then the
pentium has some advantages. The celerons biggest advantage is that you
can overclock them easily. (Same for the intel coppermine pay $240US for
a 600E with 100Mhz bus speed and overclock at 800 with a 133 bus speed
will make a reliable system) Two of them will make a screaming machine
but I do not know how well they will work together with smp again what
do you want to spend your time learning. But then your 440BX motherboard
will not do 133 so forget that for now.
Regarding memory buy the best. Memory problems suck. Personally I use
kingston and atlas precision memory and I have had zero memory related
problems. My boxes have always been stable except when I play win98
games and then the stability just sucks but its a function of the win98
environment not my box. Linux is rock solid. (Either redhat 6.1 or
currently I use Mandrake 7.0 on everything but again I was careful
selecting good hardware)
If you want to try scsi go for it and learn. Ultra2 wide scsi is a lot
faster than ide udma 66 because the sustained data transfer rate is a
lot higher. I use ibm deskstar (22GXP and 34GXP) udma66 drives under the
ata33 spec on one linux box. You can optimize them to give you a
sustained 16MB/s throughput. They are fast, quiet, very reliable and
have a nice long guarantee. If you want to go to scsi look at the ibm
ultrastar 18 GB scsi lvd(low voltage differential). The price on these
scsi drives is dropping fast because a lot of people are using them
($312 today $440 last november). Again you get quiet speed, reliability
and a nice long guarantee. IBM makes good drives. Its one of the things
that they do, I think, better than anyone else and you can count on them
not giving you any trouble with linux. Do not put a mix of vendors
drives in any box. Not that it will not work because you can find some
dink who has done it and will give you a testimonial about it. Different
manufacturers do things to cut costs and sometimes they push things out
to where they do not work well with each other so to generally avoid
problems (with ide drives only) avoid using different manufacturers
drives in any computer. Last thought here is that scsi drives will cost
you a little over twice as much per gigabyte as the ide drives.
For your scsi vs ide consider optimizing your system with an ultra2 wide
scsi drive as your main environment and stick some ide drives in for
mass storage where you keep stuff that you do not use a lot. It would be
an interesting project just to work out how to best optimize something
like that.
Enjoy you project, have lots of fun, learn lots
Tom
"Sergio P. Korlowsky" wrote:
>
> After following the list for quite some time, I decided to go and buy a
> dual processor MotherBoard
> since I read there were many problems with ultra-dma/66 I purchased a
> ultra DMA/33.
>
> The MB is based on the Intel 440BX chipset. supports Pentium cpus up to
> 650mhz,
> it has 5 PCI 32 bit slots and one AGP Dual Master IDE connectors ATX
> power conn.
>
> I am planning to buy a couple of Celeron-500 and here is where I am
> seeking your advice.
> Is anyone having problems with Celeron processors... or would it be
> advisable to spend some
> more and buy the Pentium-II or III cpus?
>
> For the moment I will install 128 Mb of SDRAM (PC100) and probably
> upgrading to 256mb
> and another point I would like advice is... HDD I've never used SCSI
> before,
> all I have is a scsi Matsuchita 8x CDR.
>
> Would it be better SCSI or EIDE? I know scsi has a faster access time,
> but is it noticeable?
> or about the same that wouldn't care to go the extra mile?
>
> TIA to all of you guys and gals...
>
> Sergio P. Korlowsky
