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Who needs text OR graphics? My brother got a new Asus A7N8X Deluxe board for his birthday (along with a new Athlon XP and DDR RAM) and I was shocked to hear the bootup sequence results being SPOKEN out of the onboard sound card!

You'd hear in a sort of female type voice that the bootup was complete and the OS was loading. How about that for advanced boot?

Asus S1 Series
Got everything you wanted, is thin & light and still got a 13,3" screen and you can purchase it without a OS. A internal WLAN nic is available,too.
Linux seems to work without (big) problems: Howto from Linux-on-laptops

I'm in pretty much the same situation, and I've been looking at this baby. Asus A7N8X Deluxe with:
DDR400
USB 2.0 x 6
IEEE 1394 x 2
Ethernet x 2
ATA/133 + SATA x 2
Onboard 5.1 Audio
$140

Review

absolutely, I've replaced four drives in the last few months for myslef and others, two 7200 rpm maxtors, a laptop Fujitsu and a standard Fujitsu. All have still been under warranty and barely more than a year old. It's interesting that a lot of these companies have now gone to a one year warranty as opposed to the old 3 year which was the industry standard for years. My next motherboard will have intergrated raid.

That means that integrated SATA controllers (not available until next year)

Available right now, by the way. I just installed one yesterday.

Too bad they didn't include SATA adapters so that I can actually use the SATA ports with my ATA133 drives.

Serial ATA

Gigabit Lan

IEEE1394 (FireWire)

RAID

Multiple Overclocking features.

These are actually subsidizing notebook 3D chipset development...Most of these manufacturers already have Notebook Chipsets...the thing is, these are cheaply made and they keep their engineers developing new technologies.

nVidia already has GeForce4 GO line of processors for notebooks...and to think that this chipset would be just as good/affordable as it is without integrated desktop video development is denying the obvious.

As for what use are they...what about using these chips in Micro-ATX systems?

At least these are using integrated DDR memory rather than SMA!!! (which is probably the only thing that makes these things "Performance")

These chips are the kind that end up in the hands of Schools, Businesses, and "Joe Consumer". Most of the systems shipped by major manufacturers (Dell, IBM, Gateway) are sold with integrated video. It's cheaper, and it just works for most things...

Most of these chips won't even see 3D GFX half the time, and when they do it will be things like UT, EA Sim* Games (which tend to be 2D anyhow), etc...

Like it or not, 99% of game sales will probably end up going to systems with integrated video.

I don't think the people that he talked about was the consumers, but the hardware vendors, why there is no motherboard with firewire?

We've got an Asus P4S8X on order at work that includes onboard FireWire (and USB 2.0 and Serial ATA, as well). Other SiS 648 motherboards ought to have it as well, since FireWire is built into the chipset.

You mean like the Asus A78VX, Abit AT7-MAX2, Aopen AX4BMAX, Gigabyte GA-8IEXP, Soyo SY-P4I Fire Dragon, or Asus P4B533-E?

These are all new motherboards, and most of them are on the high end of pricing.

Firewire is more expensive to implement, period. And the number of devices that can substantially benefit from the faster speed of Firewire are very few (basically digital video... high end digital audio as well, but that's so stratospheric as to be irrelevant in the consumer market).

You mean like the Asus A78VX, Abit AT7-MAX2, Aopen AX4BMAX, Gigabyte GA-8IEXP, Soyo SY-P4I Fire Dragon, or Asus P4B533-E?

These are all new motherboards, and most of them are on the high end of pricing.

Firewire is more expensive to implement, period. And the number of devices that can substantially benefit from the faster speed of Firewire are very few (basically digital video... high end digital audio as well, but that's so stratospheric as to be irrelevant in the consumer market).

Ok, Well after reading the first hundred or so posts I've realized that most of you are strokeing your ego's and not awnsering the man's question!

Now, Simply put here are some sites that contain a lot of information to digest.
Tom's Hardware
AnandTech

Now here is a list of components to pick, and please do your self a favour and do some resarch before hand, get some do's and dont's and faq's stuck in your skull before spending any hard earned dough.

BTW I build systems on the side for the not so techniclly apt (as I'm sure many /. readers do for friends and family!).

Heres your shopping list
1. CASE w/PS (at least 350W ATX and a size you could "Grow" into)
2. Mother Board (Think long and hard about this one as it is a more important choice than even your CPU or RAM). Personal recomendations include ECS, MSI, Asus, and if you like spending money Tyan. Not to mention Gigabyte, Abit and shuttle, however if you visit the both tom's and anands they will have all the links for you with recent information and benchmarks. 3. CPU (what ever you want to spend on this will directly determine the capabilities of your system hence money=power!)
4. Ram (your options are limited by the capablilties of your motherboard.).
5. Video (again do you play video games or do you simply fart around in office all day and surf the net?). And if you play video games how much power do you need (can you afford to spend upwards of $400 on a card?).
6. Sound (Are you a musicaian, do you want home-theatre quality or is the AC'97 on the motherboard good enough for you?).
7. Optical devices (DVD, CD-ROM, CDRW, DVDRW?) again functionality direclty determined by price. DVDRW drives cost roughly $300 - $500 and the media is $4 to $8 per (and when you screw up they make expensive coasters). On the other hand I pay about 12 cents us per blank CD-R. (I purchase bulk!).
8. Storage (again price determins functionality). all drives now start at around 40GB and cost about $70 to $150.

9. Printing/Scaning (do you need a multifunction device to deal with the "real" paper world?).

10. Lastly but definitly most important! Connectivity! Will you get DSL? Do you already have a DOCSIS compliant cable provider in your area? or are you stuck with a measly little 56K modem? (I'm sorry I'm biased by my Canauk 3.5MB/s DSL.) The choice is simple if you get a modem stick with USRobitics or GVC. (both have lifetime warrenties). If you get a NIC (Network Interface Card), then you may consider weather or not you'll use the added features of a $50 3Com or weather or not a $10 Realtek will do?

Now you have a lot of foot work to do, quotes are a bitch! I only say that haveing worked in a computer store sales environment. They take time effort and forethought. You will get out of it what you put into it. If you simply think "Ok I'll get one of those dell's or compaq's and add what I need as I go!" well then you will be stuck with whatever decisions you make. Keep in mind computer parts depreceate faster than Ford Pinto's! So if you maintain a steady investment then you will have great preformance at price point that would make any scrouge druel. Stay away from used hardware unles it has a warrenty! Refurbished monitors are a huge saveings and have a one year warrenty. Realisticly you should simply say "This is my budget and this is what I need!" If you know what your doing (after all that reading!) then you'll get a killer deal. If you like you can even email me and I'll send you a quote .

A note to the rest of you /.'ers my first computoy was a crappy zenith vic clone that turned up the daisy's to a cup of tea across the keyboard. Peek and Poke are KEWL! The second system I used was a MICOM (Text ONLY! muahahah in beautiful PUKE ORANGE!), and the first color system I ever touched was a comodore 128 (with a whopping 128K). The first system I purchased (I will never buy a name brand again!) was a crappy AST (no they don't exist anymore!) and the first system I built was a 386SX, followed by a K6 266 and then an Abit BP-6 (man $70/processor and there are 2). Now I run a dual Athalon setup (Yes I render stuff and cant work without multitasking). My older computing geek friends tell me of the 'days of yore' when your 'codeing tools' consisted of a hole punch and bristol board cut to the right size, analog computers, and the first IBM/Amdhal S360's that in thier old age required physical battery to operate properly.

Of course, since there are really only half a dozen or so BIOS vendors, the mobo vendor manuals are pretty much interchangable, and /. not withstanding, I've found several web sites post documentation for them besides this one via Google.

you can put that memory bandwidth to good use. Normally, the asus board , using the via kt333 chipset, runs the fsb at 133MHz DDR and the memory bus at 166MHz DDR (if you have PC2700 memory). In order to get that extra memory bandwidth to the cpu, you have to increase the fsb clock to 166MHz DDR. If you're not into overclocking you cpu 25%, then you have to lower the clock mulitplier to compensate. The asus board offers a 1/5 clock divider for your pci bus so all your other devices can run in spec. Have fun :).

P.S. The MHz stuff.
MHz only means millions of cycles per second. Exactly what that means depends on how you define "cycle". If you're using the accepted definition of a cycle, in terms of memory, then you're talking about a cycle bounded by the event which occurs every time your bus does this:

_
/ \_/

(I'm not the best ascii artist but you get the idea) and the memory bus operates at 166MHz. However, if you're calling a cycle the event that occurs every time the bus can put a bit on a data line, then the memory bus operates at 333MHz. Either way, you're still going to get a maximum throughput of 2.7GB/s.

P.P.S.
If you want to change your fsb from 133MHz to 166MHz then you have to get a cpu with a rated frequency into which 166 will divide nicely. That means the XP 2000+ (1666MHz) or the XP 1500+ (1333MHz). If you get any other processor, you'll have to overclock or underclock a little since the cpu multiplier can only be set to multiples of 1/2.

I got one of these from Asus. It's pretty good, graphics performance isn't the best and it runs a little hot, but other than that cheap and fast.

I would happily downgrade to my old p166 for broadband in an instant. If you pirate oops I mean sure mp3's all day long then the connection is the most important bottleneck in regards to performance. Infact many new portable discplayers like the sony I am using now easily has enough cpu power to decode mp3's. Hell, even a 486 could has enough power to do it. However your 200mhz system is useless for video games and quite painfull under linux when you actually need to compile anything. I remember waiting for 45 minutes to compile one of the 2.2 kernels. My current system ( pIII700) can compile the bigger 2.4 kernels in around 20-25 minutes and I played with an athlonXP1800 which could do it in around 5 minutes. My guess is your system would take at least an hour if not more to compile just the more recent 2.4 linux kernels. Unless your happy playind doom1 and doom2 and quake my guess is that your system is quite useless for anything modern besides playing cards. Go to asus's website and find a local reseller for a cheap AMD duron motherboard or an intel celeron motherboard if you are worried your powersupply could cause problems. You can get a great cpu/mobo combo for like $160. Add another $125 for 256 megs of DDram. Then buy a pny el-cheapo geforce3mx for like $70. Whats great about the newer motherboards is that they will fit in your case. So for $350 you could have a brand new computer that will play quakeIII, run kde and gnome fine in Linux and you will still have money left over for broadband. I never buy new computers anymore. I just build them.

I am in an interesting diloma myself. I want to try gentoo Linux which compiles all your apps automatically when you have a dependency problem. This would be a big royal pain in the ass with my old pIII700 when I have gigs and gigs of apps installed. So I am looking for an athlonMP2000 dual cpu system which would make me cream in my pants. The problem? Money. How often would I do a gentoo style "emerge world"? About maybe once a month. But I need to buy a new car and money problems are hurting me. So thinking wisely I will only upgrade modestly and just do an "emerge world" at night. So I know exactly how you feel. Life sucks but we have to make smart choices and use what we have.

It's not just you -- I just upgraded my dad to a 1.6 GHz P4 using the Asus P4B266 mobo, and it has pre-recorded voice messages for various POST errors, as well as the ability to substitute your own logo on the boot screen.

Don't know about the case, but a good motherboard might be the Asus TUSI-M - it seems to have everything you're looking for and Asus has always been one for stability (IMO). Why not just get a 1U rackmount case or something along those lines? They can be kinda costly, but you'll probably be able to use it for a loooong time. I built a small PC but I just grabbed an old 386/486 IBM case and drilled new holes for the mobo. It was very thrown together, but it works and it's tiny.

Your "ATA/100" motherboard does not support 48-bit addresing.

Although not as small as this PC for just a little bigger you can get an ASUS Terminator and use an AMD Proc. Although, no DDR just yet... :(

JOhn

• ASUS Terminator $199
  
• 2x 160GB Drives $400
  
• 512MB of RAM $130
  
• Athlon 1.4GHz (Tbird) $104
  

The hacks to hook the pvr to my pc make the pvr a much more attractive buy. All I'd have to do is run some cabling to the computer when I wanted to store something permanently.

I added TiVoNET, so I hooked up the Cat 5 run that I had been using previously with a computer under the TV. That puts it on my LAN 24/7. It grabs guide data through the cable-modem connection, and I can use netcat and ExtractStream to (usually) get a TV show onto one of my computers for editing and reencoding.

But from the looks of the links, it's not quite there yet.

It is a bit rough around the edges, but it usually works as long as you're not afraid of shell prompts and batch files (and if you're here, you probably aren't). There are some shows that I'd like to keep around (I'm currently archiving Enterprise), and SVCDs take up much less space than tapes. Editing and reencoding is the most time-consuming part, but that's nothing that faster hardware won't cure. (Somewhere, an Asus A7M266-D is calling to me...:-) )

From the spec page:

Hard Disk Drive
2.5" 9.5mm IDE HDD with Ultra DMA66/100 supported
Supported capacities up to 30 GB
Bumping mechanic's design
Fixed type, easy for BTO

Some dancin' auto repair technicain desgined it! Also, the hard drive isn't broken because Bachman-Turner Overdrive would find that difficult to use.

Post anonymous in case you don't wanna give karma to a "whore". :)

Tom.

Try http://www.asus.com/Products/Notebook/B1000/index. html

ASUS LiveUpdate V3.28.05 for Windows 9X/ ME/ 2000/ NT4.0.

I expected at least a reboot, but Asus LiveUpdate flashed our BIOS in Windows without a hitch. Now they just need a Linux flash utility..

As nice as Quake 3 is, it still isn't truly 3D. "WTF, who the hell is this moron! Q3 is 3D!!" you're probably screaming at your monitor, and getting a glare by your family members. But, it's the truth. Its 3D on 2D. The plane of your monitor's screen is two dimensional.

According to this definition, it still could be "true 3d". Just pick up an ASUS GeForce Deluxe package. It comes with "3D Stereoscopic glasses" that makes everything appear 3D to your eyes. (It uses one of those high-speed shutters, and syncs with the monitor refresh)

This has been around for a while - I have an ASUS GeForce (original) card with this feature. Who knows how long it was available before then.

but at least the US government is keeping advanced video technology out of the hands of those evil Taiwanese companies!!
Tom's Hardware is in for heartbreak.

Asustek already manufactures GeForce3 video cards, whether it is manufactured in China or not, I do not know... but I've never heard of any similar news of the US government urging nVidia not to liscence or sell their chips to Asustek. I think I can safely say that the GeForce3 is more powerful than Sony's Emotion Engine.

Well, it seem these days, most of the power user just care to get something like 200fps in Quake III. Why ? Beat's me ! I'm not on a quest to get the ultimate frame rate, I just want my box to be quiet as possibly can be.

To help you understand my take on the subject, here is the background :
My PC has the following components :

• A OEM case
• A 235W OEM power supply
• ASUS P3B-F
• Intel Pentium II rated 400Mhz @ 400Mhz
• A cheap OEM SECC2 Heat-Sink made of aluminum
• A 128MB CAS2 no-name DIMM
• Two 32MB CAS3 Samsung DIMM slowing down my memory timing, but preventing the appearance of the all mighty evil SwaP
• A ATI All-In-Wonder Rage128 16MB
• A Creative SoundBlaster Live! Value
• A Realtek 8139 Ethernet NIC
• My beloved USR 56Kbps ISA Real Modem. Sorry but to me a component that uses CPU power to do it's processing instead of taking the load off is not worthy of being in my computer. Not to mention the M$ Win part...
• A Creative 48x CD-ROM drive. It's the loudest damned thing in my computer when it's spinning
• A Quantum Fireball AS PLUS 40GB (7200RPM) in a removable tray
• A Quantum Fireball CX1 10GB (5400RPM) mounted inside the case
• Of course the stupid old 1.44 MB floppy drive only used for booting Tomsbrt in case of emergency

Soon to be :

• A Adaptec 2940UW
• A Diamond Monster 3D II for Glide games

It turn out that the Quantum Fireball AS makes less noise than the Quantum Fireball CX1. I still have to figure it out ...

I use my PC for :

• Running Linux and learning as much as time allows me (Jez I had so much time when I was a student... Think of all the time I wasted in High-School running the evil W monster)
• Doing some gaming i.e. : Diablo II, Unreal, UT, Undying (Although that thing is going to cost me a new box)
• Spending numerous nights filling my brain @ Slashdot, Tomshardware, Anandtech, Arstechnica, StorageReview, Developper.Intel.com, and most importantly, hounding the web for all the case manufacturers and their take at a quiet box.

As I'm writing this post, that is probably going to be the base documentation for my Silent Case Project, you're guessing that my sleepless night of browsing have not yielded the desired result.

I've check out many options such as water cooling, moving the PC to the closet, returning to the forest where a PC is pretty far from your everyday quest for survival. None of them suits me.

The objective of my project is to build a case that meets the following criteria :

• A silent as possible
• Accessible
• Provides sufficient ventilation to maintain all the components running within thermal specs
• Be light enough to be easily transportable (Let's not forget the Lan parties ;-)

To attain those goals I have to :

• Read all I can about noise, sound, aerodynamics, PC specs
• Find suitable materials : A case is not just a protection against unwanted fingers and dust ; it must provide EMI shielding, proper grounding, resist to impacts, and fit into my conception of the king of object you want in your bedroom (If you were thinking about plywood and a box of rusted leftover nails, forget it)
• Find the tools or the companies or individuals with the means to work the materials I choose to build the casing

For the sound isolation I was thinking about some kind of foam. Mineral lint would be affective but that takes too much space and it's not the kind of thing I want beside my bed. Form the casing itself, metal is almost inevitable if you want EMI shielding and grounding. And as for you who wonder why I have not mentioned water cooling yet, the greatest source of noise is not my CPU cooler and your just moving the problem out of the case (Nice ; you have water heating up but unless your reservoir is like a bathtub or something you will have to transfer the heat for the water to the air).

That about as far as I am. If you have any idea that might help me, please fell free to send me some bits forming ASCII characters at Prozzaks@operamail.com

To finish up, here is a list of thing that might help people wanting to achieve similar goals :

• http://www.formfactors.org/ You should be able to find all the documents regarding the ATX form factor and thermal design guides. A must if you want to build a quiet PC.
• http://developer.intel.com/ Intel has contributed a great deal to the ATX definition ; here you will find many relevant documents including thermal design guides for all Intel processors.
• Etract from my favorite's :
  
  

  Hardware\cases PC CASE
  Fong Kai
  PowerOn
  Enlight Corporation
  dir.yahoo Enclosures Manufacturers
  procase
  YY Computer
  Psi
  IN WIN
  Amtrade
  American Suntek
  Addtronics
  A-Top Technology, Inc
  Nikao
  Palo Alto Products
  Antec
  Lian-Li
  amaquest
  Koolance
  Quietpc
  PC Power & Cooling
  
  
  

  Hardware\Heat Sinks ALPHA
  Cooler Master
  AVC
  ekl
  GlobalWIN
  globefan
  RDJD
  Foxconn
  Spring Spread
  Sanyo Denki
  TITAN
  TaiSol
  ChipCoolers
  Orb a
  ElanVital
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Form Factor Platform Development Support
  SSI
  WTX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Standards Fibre Channel Industry Association
  PCI SIG
  RAB
  serialata
  SPEC
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Storage RAID.edu
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Cours CS 252 - Graduate Computer Architecture
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info The PC Guide!
  Hardware Bible
  FullOn3D
  developer.intel.com
  HwB The Hardware Book
  United Overclockers
  Ars Technica
  Tech-Junkie
  HardwarePub
  Webopedia
  Illustrated Guide to the PC Hardware
  SysOpt
  2CPU
  Ace's Hardware
  Technical Support - RaidHelp v1.0 - Free RAID Technology Guide
  Computer Architecture
  OPENCORES.ORG
  TechFest
  MidWest Micro Support
  
  
  

  Hardware\Resalers GeekTek!
  Micro-Bytes
  ALCO
  ABC Micro
  2CoolTek
  Plycon Computers
  TCWO
  ABC Micro - Lprix
  Case Outlet
  The Chip Merchant, Inc
  Cimsys
  OrdiGros
  ALIENWARE
  SHENTECH
  FireStorm
  Hyper Microsystems
  TWEAKBOX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Reviews Tom's Hardware Guide
  Sharky Extreme
  StorageReview
  HardOCP
  AnandTech
  SystemLogic
  x-bit labs
  Active-Hardware
  FiringSquad
  SocketA
  Overclockers Australia
  HEXUS
  dansdata
  SysReview
  
  
  

  Hardware\Manufacturers AMD
  ASUS
  Belkin
  MassMultiples
  Promise
  StarTech
  VIA Technologies, Inc
  ABIT Computer Corp
  Comcase
  Micron Semiconductor
  ECS
  
  
  

  Hardware Freeboxen
  

here: http://www.asus.com/products/seethrough_1.asp

ISA was phased out in the recent motherboards. Almost all motherboards being released have no ISA slots. Go see for yourself.

Guess again. While you usually don't get the 3 or 4 ISA slots you would get in the past, you don't have to look far to find a board that'll support your modem, SCSI card (hey, why waste an Adaptec 29160 on a scanner when a 1502 works just as well for that purpose?), or whatever, while still supporting the latest technologies (such as DDR SDRAM) and the fastest processors available.

ISA was replaced..

If you look at the current bus system it uses a ISA bridge. The ISA bus is acually a extension of the PCI bus. There is no more ISA controler in the old fasioned sence.. The new system will take control and there will be a extension to support PCI..

ISA was phased out in the recent motherboards. Almost all motherboards being released have no ISA slots. Go see for yourself.

From the Asus A7V manual, page 45: "Beep: High frequency beeps when system is working Meaning: CPU overheated, system operating at a reduced frequency"

A bit more flexible option than the laptops people are suggesting.. You can find cases at elan vital and aopen. Asus has numerous boards in microatx. Here's their KT133 based one.

If you want even smaller, you can go FlexATX. Motherboards are scarce, however. I think Tyan has one, but no AGP slot on there.

--

Tom's Hardware recently did a write-up on this portable with many examples of customizing it.

PCChips motherboards are the bane of installfests everywhere. The PCChips Consortium is a loose affiliation of the worst manufacturers in Taiwan and in the People's Republic of China. Example member: Amptron. They are responsible for hideous abortions like the VXPro chipset, the VXTwo chipset, the TXTwo chipset, ad nauseam.

During a period when I was trying to find a SANE bitty box, I came across ASUS' version. It doesn't come cheap, and it's hard to find, but it's based on the solid-as-a-rock Intel BX chipset and has either a flip-chip socket or a Slot 1 CPU connector.

It would be great if someone did a bitty box based on Socket A and designed for Duron...the Duron would be an ideal chip for such a box.

Anyway...DON'T fsck around with the BookPC! You will live to regret it! Particularly if you want to use it with Linux.

----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!

Most i815E boards have this..
Example:
ASUS CUSL2

You want an Asus V7700 - nVidia GeForce2 GTS 64M. Either that, or by the time Xmas rolls around, the nVidia GeForce2 Ultra should be out and about.


--

ASUS P2E-VM microATX motherboard
This one has a built-in AGP 3D Graphics Accelerator (ATI Rage Pro), along with on-board audio, etc.

ASUS P2E-M microATX motherboard
This one drops the on-board stuff and has a standard AGP slot instead - which gives you better flexibility for your video demands. You lose a PCI slot though which kinda bites.

ASUS P2E-VM microATX motherboard
This one has a built-in AGP 3D Graphics Accelerator (ATI Rage Pro), along with on-board audio, etc.

ASUS P2E-M microATX motherboard
This one drops the on-board stuff and has a standard AGP slot instead - which gives you better flexibility for your video demands. You lose a PCI slot though which kinda bites.

Yes, this is an older design (Tom reviewed it in May), and it's based on the 440BX chipset. Asus apparently got around the "no ATA/66 on 440BX" by using a different chipset for the controller -- and put in two of them for good measure!! Cool.

I haven't looked around much, but with the proliferation of IDE/ATAPI Zip drives, DVD drives, CD-RW drives, and the incredible availability of cheap hard drives, I have to think this idea [of multiple IDE controllers] is going to stick around. Other motherboard manufacturers should get the clue very soon, if they haven't already.

Replying to my own message here, something I forgot:

Email ASUS and complain here (marketing), and here (tech support).

(I had those email addresses in my story submission to Slashdot as well... oh well.)

I noticed that the Asus board link was omitted. Asus' board allows CPU external (FSB) frequency settings to be set in 1 MHz-increments or reduction.
Very similar to Abits board, but unfortunately it has less expansion slots (1 AGP and 5 PCI, while the Abit has 1 AGP, 5 PCI, and a PCI/ISA combo).

IF DDR-SDRAM WAS A SLAM DUNK EASY THING, SOMEBODY WOULD HAVE ALREADY DONE IT.

You mean, like GeForce cards?

(what's the difference between SDRAM and SGRAM anyways?)


Your Working Boy,

--

1. I run an ASUS P2B-DS with two PII/300s and two IBM ultrawide SCSI disks. The machine is bombproof and very fast. This is my desktop machine and is used largely for Java development - none of our servers have or need anything like this performance.
2. However, I wouldn't build or buy a new machine just now. I'm waiting to see whether anyone is going to put together a four-way or eight-way Crusoe motherboard and if so what it will cost. The Crusoe is a much smaller die than the Pentium and consequently is very much cheaper to produce. This doesn't mean it will be sold cheaper, but it could be; I'm prepared to bet the real production cost of eight Crusoes is significantly less than two PIIIs

Me too. I've got an Athlon 500 at home, which, with the TNT2 Ultra I've got, feels so incredibly fast at every game I've tried...

And I'm buying two more. Doing my part to support them.

I don't understand why people would be buyin Intel chips - okay, Athlon motherboards are a bit more expensive and as far as I can tell, none of them support AGP 4X, but AGP 4X hasn't proved to be a big win anyway (and not many Intel boards support it). And after you pay for the Intel chip, the cheaper board doesn't win you anything.

I've got an Asus K7M, btw, which is a great board. Overclocking options right in the bios - woohoo!

(Oh, and check out this article, which basically says that you can add about 5% to all the benchmarks you've seen if you buy a newer motherboard or are lucky enough to have the newer version of the chipset that supports Super Bypass).

Asus seems to make at least one.

http://www. asus.com/products/motherboard/Pentiumpro/P3b-1394/ index.html