<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="SGML-Tools 1.0.9"> <TITLE>Linux PCI-HOWTO: Conclusion </TITLE> <LINK HREF="PCI-HOWTO-12.html" REL=next> <LINK HREF="PCI-HOWTO-10.html" REL=previous> <LINK HREF="PCI-HOWTO.html#toc11" REL=contents> </HEAD> <BODY> <A HREF="PCI-HOWTO-12.html">Next</A> <A HREF="PCI-HOWTO-10.html">Previous</A> <A HREF="PCI-HOWTO.html#toc11">Contents</A> <HR> <H2><A NAME="s11">11. Conclusion </A></H2> <P> <P>If you have some moneny to put into your machine, you'd be well off with a Pentium90, ASUS-SP4, which is what I use at the moment. If you can afford 32M RAM that would be much better than 16M RAM. <P>Real soon now the upcoming standard will be the Triton Chipset with support for special SIMMS called EDODRAM, and SRAM. Both will be more expensive than PS2-RAM, and at the time of writing (28-June-1995) SRAM is not available. While EDO-DRAM is more expensive, this is not because of the production costs, they are said to be the same. <P>For a highperformance system I would still choose an ASUS-TP4/XE with EDO-DRAM, but if you do not need to use it at the moment, I d rather wait some more. <P>For Graphic-boards I'd say the best cheap board fitting perfectly on a good Multisync-15 like the Samsung SyncMaster 15Gli, is the SPEA V7 Mirage P64 with Trio64 Chipset and 2M DRAM. For more sophisticated Display like the Iiyama-IDEK 8617A-T I think the PCI Mach64 ATI-GUP-Turbo (not the cheaper GUP-Turbo-Windows) would be a good choice, with 4M RAM you can have truecolor in higher resolutions. It is well supported in the XFree86(tm)-3.1.1, and there are commercial X-Servers available of which I'd recommend Accelerated/X by Roell, which supports the Mach64 very well and fast. <P>For SCSI I'd take the DPT rather than the (much cheaper and very fast) NCR53c810 in case you plan to use SCSI-Tapes a lot. The NCR53c810 driver on Linux does lack disconnect/reconnect support, thus blocking the SCSIbus on operations like "mt rewind", "mt fsf" etc. It bears a performance penalty on tar-operations - but check out Drews new alpha drivers before making a decision, perhaps it does solve all the problems. <P>For building servers, the DPT would be the controller of choice anyway because of all the nifty hardware cache (with elevator sorting on accesses, so cache it is not a silly thing even in a Linux enviroment where the OS does the caching) and RAID-Support up to raid level 5. <P>If you do not want to spend that much money on computer equipment (e.g.: you are having a life) you might go for an ASUS-SP3-SiS with AMD-DX2/66 or DX4/100. The SPEA V7 Mirage P64 PCI with 2M DRAM would be a good choice, since it uses the Trio64 S3 Chip, which is well supported by XFree86(tm)-3.1.1, quite cheap to buy and fast, too. <P>Another fine card since XFree86(tm)-3.1 is the fast and cheap et4000/w32-PCI-card. <P> <HR> <A HREF="PCI-HOWTO-12.html">Next</A> <A HREF="PCI-HOWTO-10.html">Previous</A> <A HREF="PCI-HOWTO.html#toc11">Contents</A> </BODY> </HTML>