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

To: Clarence Dodge who wrote (2806)	10/8/1998 10:44:00 AM
From: Dave Hanson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Clarence, you're welcome. I don't know offhand if the 3com chip is proprietary, but I wouldn't worry about it if it were--it is quite standard. I've also heard good things about both intel and linksys cards--they just weren't as promising candidates when I was doing my shopping last. (I do have a linksys fast hub which I've been very happy with: onsale.com has some truely great prices on these, as I've mentioned in earlier posts. I very much like the symbios adapter. The NCR 810 SCSI chip is not unlike the DEC NIC chip: an industry standard with excellent driver support built right into NT. (Should add that the only problems I have had came from grabbing the updated 8xx drivers from the symbios site.) The price I mentioned is an absolute steal for a fast PCI controller with internal and external connectors. You don't hear it mentioned much because it is marketed primarily as an OEM, rather than a retail solution. With some Award bioses, their is built in support for the NCR chips (notably ASUS boards. Unfortunately, the Abit BH6 does _not_ appear to have this, at least in its first bios version.) If your bios has this, you're getting an robust bootable controller to boot. I don't think you have to worry about SCSI/IDE problems under NT, provided that you're using a good, modern bios. I like IDE for hard drives, because the price performance is simply leagues beyond SCSI hard drives. SCSI is nice for just about everything else, and it keeps the limited IDE ports free for HDDs. I would mention that but for my HP IIcx scanner, which needs SCSI, I might have gone straight IDE with a promise fasttrak controller. See earlier posts for more on this. Needless to say, ZP, Sean, Spots, and others may have lots of good stuff to add to this.