re dx isa vlb xor dx eisa advice wanted on thu apr gmt ross mitchell rmitch irus rri uwo ca wrote i want to use this proposed beast for basically four things editing documents using wordperfect under dos creating graphs analyzing data using sigmaplot v under dos editing playing with images using aldus photostyler running under windows these images can be large say k x k bits pixel using the pc as an xterminal running desqview x and sun pc nfs talking to our network of sparcstation s this is where a lot of the images data come from and is the most demanding of these tasks i ve read read read pc magazines performed benchmarks read this newsgroup and decided that a nice system price performance would be dx k cache isa vlb meg ram ati graphics ultra pro meg ram local bus monitor x ni com etherlink iii bit maxtor mb ide hard drive however the parts don t fit our local retailer apparently put one of these together only to discover that the ati card wouldn t run at mhz surprise surprise actually after reading this group i m surprised that they even have a mhz local bus running i have a choice now between basically the above system but with a dx with isa and vlb or a dx with eisa and no vlb and thus the non local bus version of the ati card which is better keeping in mind that i m primarily interested in the last two tasks having in mind the size of the images my opinion is to go with vlb it has much more bandwith that eisa which in fact can be utilized by the craphics card i have not made measures so someone else may share experience on that also the dx is faster in the operations that run off internal cache slightly slower off the external and about the same off memory so my advice is the vlb we re quite happy with the ati card very fast once the data gets to it slow repainting images under photostyler that have moved off screen or been uncovered there doesn t seem to be enough raw cpu when running desqview x its sluggish running the local window manager also many functions under photostyler take a long time even when the images fit entirely in ram there s not enough memory in the system desqview x and a meg smartdrive don t leave much room for other apps photostyler will page to disk with medium size images have you tried running photostyler without the cache no need to have paging and cache both well you might argue that the paging is cached my belief no measurements is that apps left with more memory will manage it better than smartdrv exe sys i have performed a number of benchmarks on the ethernet transfer rates this machine sustains only k sec over ethernet while our sparcs sustain k sec on the same network going to the bit version of the smc card increases transfer rates to k sec still very slow especially when moving large images is there such a thing as a local bus ethernet card coming will it make a difference i m hoping so and leaning towards the dx choice above for that reason the bandwidth theoretical of isa is over mb s which is far from mb s i tried my isa ide hard drive maxtor mb and got the same results mb s regardless of the isa bus speed mhz so i guess that just the card drivers combination is lousy also are there dx s on the horizon what about dx s dx s the rumors are that dx if any is the most likely chip to come out but note that ibm is closest to the technology an it will only sell whole motherboards so you ll have to upgrade the mb any information is greatly appreciated just some view not much figures penio penev x w internet penev venezia rockefeller edu disclaimer all oppinions are mine
