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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (211)	2/14/1998 4:58:00 AM
From: Dirk Hente	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14778

[pci slot limit, pci load & multimon gc] speaking of a dream machine, zeuspaul, how about a dual pentium II + 9 PCI slot mobo : supermicro.com currently i am trying to figure out what the limiting factors for the number of pci slots are. today i found an interesting piece of info form a usenet search: > >Info from the PCI spec: > - Approximately ten electrical loads per PCI bus > This is the limiting factor. Loads are as follows > 1) Bridge Chip > 2) 4 sockets (yes the connectors count as a load) > 3) 4 boards plugged into the connectors > 4) 1 PCI to ISA bridge chip > 5) * Some designes do not count the bridge chip so they > > have 5 slots someone commented: > some cards take more than 2 loads each > (100mb network cards seem to be a good example). It's possible to only be > able to handle 3 cards depending on the integrated peripherals. this is quite interesting.... maybe a multimon display card ( though fitting into one slot) is representing more than '2 loads' as well. this means when you plug-in your appian card (or whatever) you may overload the pci bus when 3 (or 4) other pci cards are present. BTW, the number of IRQs is not the limiting factor, because of IRQ sharing

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (211)	2/15/1998 8:03:00 PM
From: pae	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

[AGP MM vs. 2x PCI MM] It is possible that multimonitor cards would be different? Do they send more info thru the bus than standard cards? My TS screens get pretty busy: lots of tick charts updating in real time. Quadruple that and ??? But right, it probably doesn't approach 3D data xfer rates. For Tradestation is high resolution graphics an issue? What resolution is best for this application? 800X600? I'm not sure it is the best, I use 1024x768 (SVGA?) - only at 256 color though. I was at 16 color until TOY STORY or another of my daughter's apps changed me. :-) Are MM cards system resource hogs like sound cards or will they require only one IRQ? I think Dirk says no, and something about sharing. Overall, I suspect the biggest bottlenecks for TS are the harddrive xfer rate and processor speed for recalculating charts as they update. As an example, when a well-traded stock has an exceptional day - such as Oracles recent earnings warning - I have to reduce the granularity of my tick charts or get overwhelmed (as is GPF) by the data flow. Opening new charts during trading (particularly from 9:30-10am) is not impressive. Like your idea about 2 PCI cards and the 21" monitors. I already run 1 Matrox MII so that boxes upgrade would be straight forward. So I am seriously thinking about NT versus waiting for W98. I wonder if the W98 beta is stable enough to consider in the shorter run, though I don't consider myself anywhere near in Dirk's technical league. On the lighter side: I have read that a major purchase - such as a car - can cause the male of the species to exhibit stalking behavior. I haven't noticed any of the other species on this topic (no offense intended if I am mistaken - feel free to prove me wrong, certainly wouldn't be the first time) so by way of a parting salutation I give you ... Happy Hunting!