Comments on Street Walker's latest proposal
In case you didn't happen to catch my previous post, Street Walker (which was in reply to Zeuspaul), you'll get some additional thoughts at my
Message 4739327.
Questions:
-I gather you'll only want to run 98? Since your system is all business, stability would presumedly be quite important. Also, you're willing to throw lots of RAM at that beast. These might argue for NT (or dual boot), if you're willing to face the learning curve and don't use lots of DOS apps.
-how big and capable are the monitors you'll be using with this system? This would affect my graphics card recs (as would the OS you'll use.)
-Has Totally Awesome indicated that they'll acquire for you parts that they don't normally stock under the same great price terms you mentioned? I wasn't impressed with the case they normally used, but if they promised you they'd get what you want, that's pretty impressive.
-Will you buy all new RAM, or reuse some? Any reason for 3 64 meg sticks? 128 meg sticks are actually cheaper than 2 64s now, and they leave more expansion room and draw less power.
-Have you gotten much info on practical limits to Win98 multimonitor capability? Seems like 4 cards might tax 98's and PCI bus's resources (though I don't really know on this)
-what other systems will you be using this with (see my previous post for more on this question)
-how much data do you store? IBM drives are excellent, and if 8.4 gigs is more than you'll need, they may be a good choice. Still, the Maxtor 2880s offer a better price/performance ratio (and apparantly very high reliability), with capacities up to 11.5 gigs each.
-if you really do think you might switch boards later (or monkey inside the case at all), a good case is well worth the investment.
-I think you're right to put the cash into more RAM rather than a faster processor. I'd perhaps even go with the 233 myself. Processor upgrades in PII systems are _very_ easy.
FYI, with Asus (and many other P2 boards), one can run the faster front side bus on the BX without using the faster processors. There are other minor reasons to do the BX over the LX (a bit more forgiving of RAM, a bit better performance), but LX is cheaper, and probably (tho not necessarily) more bug-fixed.
Those plus the previous post are probably enough questions for me to throw at you now. I'm tossing them all out because knowing the answers would help me give a much better evaluation of your proposal.
Regards,
Dave |
