Linux PCI-HOWTO

11. Conclusion

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Another fine card since XFree86(tm)-3.1 is the fast and cheap et4000/w32-PCI-card.