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

To: Howard R. Hansen who wrote (1198)	6/8/1998 2:11:00 PM
From: Sean W. Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

1. Couple of comments here. PCI Nic's generally DMA and busmaster. ISA NIC's generally use polled IO, some use DMA, even fewer busmaster. Get a PCI NIC. 2. Windows 98 vs. NT. Are you playing games or doing work. If the answer is doing work there is NO choice. NT is the only solution. 98 is better than 95 but still not as stable as NT. 3. I agree with Dave and would buy 2 or 3 systems instead of this multi-monitor beast your are looking at. Spots or anybody else do you know if when running Win NT and a dual processor motherboard if you can control which programs run on which processor? That is can you have all of the web browsers and mIRC channels run on one CPU and all of the programs you use for executing a trade run on the other CPU? No this is done dynamically by the kernal. There is a single process blocked queue. Both processors are feed off this queue. Of course, affinity is used to maintain performance. There are numerous affintity bugs with NT. (Its not Solaris). Sean

To: Howard R. Hansen who wrote (1198)	6/8/1998 4:07:00 PM
From: Spots	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Some years ago I did informal benchmarks of 10 mb ISA cards doing disk copies. I don't recall the exact details, but at approx 250-300kbytes (certainly well over 2 megabits), and including file system overhead, cpu utilization was not tremendous. I want to say 30-40%, but sadly I can't remember exactly. Anyhow, it was MUCH less than full capacity. This was on a 50mhz 486, btw. I just repeated on a P6 200 at around 600kbytes/sec (say 5 mbits), including file system overhead and IDE disk processing, cpu ran about 20% (total cpu around 25%, but I run about 5% background normally). I read benchmarks of some of the early 100mb PCI cards. The Intel 10/100 card was able, according to the benchmark, to maintain a transfer rate of 70 MEGA bits per second at something on the order of 60-70% cpu utilization of a 120 or 133 mhz P5. Possibly it was 100mhz, and possibly it was less cpu than this, but I'm virtually certain it was less than 70%. Intel was the least cpu intensive benchmarked at the time, but I noted later benchmarks in which others improved rapidly. This has now been at least two and perhaps 3 years ago. Performance has improved across the board. Of course, I'm still running those 3-year old Intel cards <G>. In short, I just don't think you're going to see significant CPU degradation in ANY modern NIC with a PII class processor. Note that these speeds are orders of magnitude higher than anything you're likely to get off the internet, even with cable or DSL. 10 megabits is 10 T1 lines, remember <ggg>. Sorry, I know nothing about Wintel multi-cpu systems. Maybe someday. Spots