*BSD News Article 47486


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From: andreas@knobel.gun.de (Andreas Klemm)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Pentium 90 vs DX4/100 performance
Date: 27 Jul 1995 04:25:02 GMT
Organization: Solaris 2.4 research kitchen
Lines: 63
Message-ID: <3v74eu$10q@knobel.gun.de>
NNTP-Posting-Host: knobel.gun.de
X-Newsreader: TIN [UNIX 1.3 950520BETA PL0]

When I installed FreeBSD 2.0.5 in the company two days ago on a 
Peacock Pentium 90 System I was impressed of the performance !!!

I'm about to sell my good old SS2 clone and to go back to
FreeBSD ... yes folks ;-)

The very very good Harddisk performance (AHA 2940) and the
real fine overall performance was impressive. 

I compiled the kernel and and during that I also got 5MB/sec disk 
throughput with iozone on the 2nd console when using 8k buffers 
(16 MB files).

Now... I can't afford a Pentium PCI dream machine with an AHA 2940.

So my question is ... Is a 80486 DX4/100 board/processor much slower ?
Or is a pentium the about $700 more worth ? I'm not doing much numerical
stuff, I only need a fast machine for News, Mail, X11, WWW.

I thought of a board that already has the NCR SCSI Chip on it to 
save the money for a separate PCI SCSI controller. I think the NCR 
Chip is in the meantime also supported by many other OS (WindowsNT, 
OS/2). So I expect no trouble here. Are there different versions
of the NCR available ? Or is it painless buying a NCR based board ?

I think of a configuration:
	80486 DX4/100
	16 or 32 MB RAM
	NCR SCSI
	opt.: 2xRS232 (16550) on board	
	4 GB SCSI Harddisk (Conner or Seagate)

What I'd additionally need is a hint, what soundcard to buy.
The goal is to get the newest/best/fastest soundcard (;-) for
PC that is also well supported by FreeBSD.

Are there some board recommendations, what motherboard to buy 
and what not to buy in conjunction with NCR SCSI Chip and FreeBSD ?
Are there rock solid Chipsets out ? Or chipsets that are worse ?

I'd like to buy a PCI board, to have later the opportunity to
add PCI cards as wanted/needed.

And concerning graphics. What graphic card is currently best buy in
your opineon ? I want a better performance then Sun GX, similar to
TGX/TGX+. I want a card, that is very fast ... I want the graphic card
for X11 under FreeBSD and it should also be fast in a PC environment
(Windows and Games). Are S3 PCI Cards currently best buy ?

Would a graphic card running in a Pentium P90 be faster than the
same card in a DX4/100 machine ???

These are the question I cannot answer myself ... I hope I can
share from the experiences of other persons in this group and
would be glad to get many recommendations. Thanks !


	Andreas ///

-- 
Andreas Klemm		You have lpd and need an intelligent print filter ?!!
			Ok, this might help: "apsfilter ... irgendwie clever"
ftp it from ----------> ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/Incoming/aps-491.tgz