Yipppeeeee!
I'm up on the PCChips 810LMR! $95 at storefront retail including video, lan, sound, and modem.
Took about 3 hours to swap motherboards from one of my boxes, load W2K Server, and configure the devices.
I am thrilled! From the manual, there was no sign W2K drivers were even available, but they were on the CD.
I know a lot of us like to think about SMP Athlon servers, but IMHO what is going to really move AMD through the killing fields the industry faces in Q1 is this board.
The on board video is great, the on board sound is fine, the on board network connection is great. There's also a modem built in, but since I have a lan and router at home, I'm not going to bother testing it.
With 2 DIMM slots, 2 PCI slots, and no AGP it isn't a killer board for an enthusiast (other boards using this chipset can be built with those features). But I mostly surf, do database manipulation, and write code at home, so I/O and raw horsepower is all I really worry about.
I put a Tbird 800 and 128 meg of Ram on it. There are two PCI slots, I will probably put a SCSI card in one of them, but that still leaves one more than I need.
I'll get a DDR board with a 760 or an ALi MagiK when they come out, but this is the chipset that AMD has been waiting for - and this is the chipset that will keep VIA honest. If VIA doesn't start focusing on the Athlon/Duron market, they'll watch it get taken away by SiS and ALi.
This board is great, great, great!
Right now, Office 2000 Premium is installing over the network (this machine has 2x4x8 CDRW so I'm using the 36x on one of the other machines to load software from).
IIS (Internet Information Server) is running fine, I will install visual studio, SQL Server and Oracle when I have time.
The ATA-100 disk I/O on this chip is better than anything out there since the north and south bridges are combined so this chipset might be a good candidate for a 1U server
Office just finished installing and I launched Word.
This is a good, a very good chipset!
Just opened an Access app with a couple hundred lines of VBA in it - still no problems!
Geeeezzz.
In Q1 OEMs will be looking at putting this $75 board in a $40 case with 128 meg of RAM for $75 and an 900MHZ Duron for $80. Add a small hard drive for $80, CD-ROM for $30, floppy, mouse, and keyboard for $40 and monitor for $130.
For their cost of $550 (probably less to a major OEM) they can make a very complete, solid system. Since hardware DVD is built into the chipset, they can add that inexpensively, too.
This is what we've been waiting for.
Waahooo!
Dan |
