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

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (1100)	6/5/1998 12:25:00 PM
From: Dave Hanson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

SW's system--"other views on the subject" "ECC 100 MHz ( not PC100 compliant ) as required for the LX chipset with the 66 MHz front side bus." Where did you hear this, Zeuspaul? Everything I've read suggests that the LX chipset can use, but doesn't require, ECC (error checking and correcting) DRAM. It typically _does_ require eeprom enabled RAM, which is different. Actually, the BX chipset is supposed to be _more_ flexible and forgiving of RAM than the LX chipset--this was a problem with LX boards, and Intel apparantly took some steps to solve it. Hence provided that one wasn't using 100 Mhz front side bus, one would likely have better luck, say, moving his SDRAM currently on his TX based Socket-7 board to a BX board (at 66 Mhz) than to an LX board. Then again, as you both note, RAM prices have plunged so much that it may make little sense to reuse RAM. The bigger concern, for me, is that I don't want a board that's fussy about what kind of SDRAM I can add later on. "The ECC will give you a reliability edge." This is definitely true--the question is how significant this is. I've seen techies rage on endlessly on this question. IMHO, the risk of so called "parity errors" on today's DRAM is just not significant enough to worry about-- 8 million things will like screw up your configuration before this one. Then again, the price premium for ECC ram has dropped substantially in recent months, so it may be worth it for piece of mind. I believe ESC technologies has a bit on ECC in a recent "what's new" post. "So 196 RAM in an LX board would out perform a BX board with 128 RAM? Care to elaborate on this?" I agree with Zeuspaul as far as he goes here. A couple of added thoughts: -NT makes much better use of additional RAM than does 95. In particular, it will dynamically cache essentially all of the extra RAM you have available to help with disk access, while 95 will not. The more RAM you want or can have, the better a performance boost you can expect with NT over 95. 98 is supposed to be better than 95, but still significantly worse than NT on this, but I haven't verified it. -Only the plain Asus LX board has 5 PCI slots. The ones with built-in networking and/or SCSI have just 4, like the P2B versions. -I think it will be awhile before it will be important to get a post BX-chipset. Merced won't be out till 2000, and Fire-wire (the one big feature missing on BX) has been further delayed. One significant thing that we can expect on boards later this year that might be nice are PC 99 (I think that's the moniker) compliant boards that are all PCI. -I think the key questions here, Street Walker, are personal. What do you envision using this system for? Trading and work only? Games too? Multiple monitors? Many, many apps loaded at one time? How important is extremely snappy performance to you? How much do you like or dread the idea of "getting under the hood?" How important is convenience vs. saving $$$? I'll feel better able to offer helpful, specific advice if you elaborate on these matters a bit. (Incidently, this is the first and most important set of questions I walk clients though when I do occasional moonlighting as a consultant to prospective hardware buyers. This thread is more sensitive to these issues, but many computer review sites fail to recognize the often decisive importance of such considerations.) -If you have the space, you might seriously consider using multiple machines (if you aren't already doing this--as I recall, you were, no?) This way you get redundancy, as well as the capacity for specializing functions among different machines. Networking is much easier than it used to be, as is sharing multiple boxes with one keyboard/mouse/monitor (more on this if you'd like.) That should be enough yammering for the moment. :)