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

To: Street Walker who wrote (1153)	6/7/1998 7:37:00 AM
From: LTBH	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

PII233 I would strongly recommend anyone considering a PII233 to consider why they are moving to a PII. A P233MMX and a PII233 are roughly comparable and its certainly cheaper to stay with a Pentium system. I will suggest now as I have in the past, with going the PII300 route, its still the sweet spot IMHO. Of course you can always stay with a Pentium and upgrade to a 233MMX if it meets your short term needs. Networm

To: Street Walker who wrote (1153)	6/7/1998 3:45:00 PM
From: Dave Hanson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14778

Partial response to Street Walker's proposed system (#2) These clarifications helped. Here are some more remarks: -I'm not clear still how many systems you're running at your trading desk. I think I've got all the other key questions down. :) It does strike me that given your desire for a multi-mon setup, there'd be real advantages to having more than one box as your main station, especially if you have a network up and running anyway. I agree with all the basic point in Zuespaul's Message 4754338 on hard drive backups. Getting two drives offers an excellent backup solution, and given your modest data requirements, should be quite easy to implement. Getting a bit fancier, You could even put one of the drives in a removable tray (cooled or not, depending) and then have something to store off site so that if the computer were stolen or destroyed, your data et al would be intact. As for Networm's remarks at Message 4756146, here are a few thoughts. -Little difference between 233-266-300 PIIs. A very apt set of benchmarks of the 300 vs. 266 vs. 233 vs. other alternative chips can be found near the bottom of the page at tomshardware.com. These were taken is using the same P2B board you're contemplating, under 95 and NT. Note that the differences between the 233 & 266 and the 266 & 300 are about 5-7%. Practically unnoticable in real world applications, and given what you're thinking of running, I don't think you'll see a difference. Price delta over the 233 is at least $50 for the 266, and $80 for the 300. (Then again this delta is dropping weekly, is much less than between 300 and 333, which offers a better (.25 micron) chip, and will be gone within a few months.) Keep in mind that these three chips are made from the _exact same silicon_, only difference being that they're certified to run at different speeds. Since the PII 233 has been fabbed for many months, I wouldn't hesitate, _myself_, to OC this to 266 or 300 (which would _not effect_ the memory bus, PCI bus, etc.--only the CPU and cache speed.) -There are good reasons IMHO, to go with a PII 233 over a P 233. First, there isn't a 64 meg cache limit. Second, upgradability is preserved. Third, the performance diff between 233 P and 233 PII (especially with 100 mhx BX chipset) is actually not minor, especially under NT. Forth, you get the benefits of AGP graphics cards. -There is a very attractive alternative. I'm finding this more interesting by the day: a totally non-Intel Socket 7 solution. New AMD chips and non-intel chipsets introduced recently offer PII performance and capability at less than pentium prices. In particular, I'm thinking of the new epox mvp3e-m MB with an AMD K-6 2 chip. Together, these run around $250, have AGP, will cache up to 256 megs of RAM with lots of cache (64k "level 1" (on-chip) and 1 meg "level 2" (off-chip), and will certainly run much cooler than a PII setup. For more on the epox board, see epox.com; for a good review, see anandtech.com. Anand, who Zuespaul has mentioned before, writes quite good if sometimes a bit long-winded and breathy reviews. (Then again, he's only a teen ager, so he can be forgiven this--and is pretty darned impressive IMHO.) He is supposed to be coming out with a comparison of these next-generation socket 7 boards in the coming days, which might be worth waiting for if this option intrigues you. Some folks shy away from non-intel solutions, and there's no question that you would not enjoy the same size installed base as people using PII setups. But the epox people have a solid reputation, and I suspect it would be as easy if not easier to get support from them than from ASUS. FWIW, I think I've changed my mind: rather than a P2B-L, I suspect this combo will likely be my next board and CPU. As I mentioned to Zuespaul, I'd defintely go with a PCI network connection. I'll stop for now and let you chew on this. Hope it was helpful, and of course feel free to follow up.