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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!news-peer.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!howland.erols.net!EU.net!news2.EUnet.fr!newsbr.eunet.fr!usenet From: Frederic.Marand@osinet.fr (Frederic MARAND) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Please suggest "best" FreeBSD workstation <= $4000 Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 07:04:53 GMT Organization: Groupe SEDI / Agorus SA / OSI SARL Lines: 46 Message-ID: <544p2l$ro4@newsbr.eunet.fr> References: <53rflp$o27@lex.zippo.com> <326269E6.15FB7483@FreeBSD.org> <DzE1u6.GJt@rockyd.rockefeller.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: 193.107.196.155 X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.0.82 Dan Ts'o <dan@dnn.rockefeller.edu> wrote: >Jordan K. Hubbard <jkh@FreeBSD.org> wrote: >: U. Kislev wrote: >: > I am allowed to spend up to US$ 4000 on a FreeBSD capable system >: > It would have to boot Windows95 too. Monitor included. >: If you're using it for development work, then you want a nice monitor. >: Find out what a nice 17" monitor costs, at the minimum, or a 21" if >: you're truly serious about your display hardware. Then spend whatever >: you have left on a P6/200 system with as much memory and hard disk space >: as you can afford. :-) I fully support this answer. > I don't think you can get a good P6/200 system with sufficient disk >and memory, plus a good 21" monitor, for under $4000. It will be close. >Under $5000, would definitely be doable. In France, it can be done, so it should probably be even easier in the US, where U. Kislev seems to work. > I'm a Gateway fan, bought 20+ of them over the years and have been >very happy. I would suggest getting Gateway's P6/200 package, ditch the >EIDE drives and get SCSI (I think Gateway will sell you an Adaptec 2940UW >plus a decent SCSI drive, I'd suggest a 2Gb), and be careful about getting >a video card that will work well with Xfree. Also get 64Mb of memory. On this, however, I can't agree : our largest customer this year switched from Gateway to us for a (small) unit price difference at our advantage, and told us later the machines were way faster with the same nominal configurations. Since there's certainly nothing godlike about us, this user should be able to find a better price/performance ratio at one of the small retail/service companies near his office. > I'm a little concerned about the cache on the system. It appears to >be only the 256KL2 on chip cache. Have to check this out... That's only part of the story : you also have to check the cache is synchronous pipeline burst, and the SRAM speed is around 7 ns. Most large scale assemblers like Gateway and IPC tend to put SRAMs slower than 10 ns, and this is really damageable to system performance. Frederic G. MARAND Agorus SA / OSI SARL Frederic.Marand@osinet.fr