Date: Sat, 19 Dec 1998 16:19:22 +1100 From: jonathan michaels <jon@caamora.com.au> To: FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: How much RAM for newbie install? Message-ID: <19981219161922.D4004@caamora.com.au> In-Reply-To: <199812152039.PAA24006@laker.net>; from Steve Friedrich on Tue, Dec 15, 1998 at 03:36:10PM -0500 References: <199812152039.PAA24006@laker.net>
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On Tue, Dec 15, 1998 at 03:36:10PM -0500, Steve Friedrich wrote: > On Tue, 15 Dec 1998 11:40:15 -0600, Gerry Marcelo wrote: > > >i486sx25 overclocked to 33 (chipset escapes me right now) clock back to original specifications, thier is no real advantage in overclocking a processor chip, unless you concider shortend life cyle an advantage. > >8megs of ram add another 32 or 64 mb of good quality full parity dram, and disregard teh rest of information about faster processors. > >Trident 8900D video card with 1mg ram this is more ahtna enough if it supplies teh resolution at teh colour depth that you application mix needs .. people always answer from what is important to THEMSELVES, very rare do tehy concider what teh person asking teh question is actually saying, asking. > >OAS brand SVGA monitor if this is a good stable 14 inch screen they stay with it, as yo beocome more acomplished or start to do graphic bas development, well by then you will have an idea of what you want anyway. in teh mean time keep any eye out for a reasonably priced hitachi or teh lower quaility, but higher priced sony either in 20 or 21 inch makes a good low budget (yes i know hoe much they cost) screen for any body who has to work infront of these things for a living. er, sorry for teh rant, i've had amy arguements on behalf of staff who had to you 'cheap' 17 inch screens when the boss got the 21 inch hitachi and used it a whole 15 minutes a day to read her email. about the only real things to concider if youwant to use x windows is how fast your sunsystems are .. the only two that really matter are real memory (teh more you have teh faster x will run) and how fast your scsi hard disk media performs. a slow scsi hard disk is several orders of magnitude faster at moving data in an x windos system than any (?)ide based adapter no matter how many zeros they put after teh leading significant digit. ide was designed for single user, single tasking .. ergo ms dos type environments. it is a tribute to unix that it can take such a poorly designed system and make it work so well. > Xwindows will be painfully slow on this machine. I have an AMD 468DX-66 > running FreeBSD 2.2.8 (I'm tracking -stable branch) and running > Xwindows is not too terribly painful, but I prefer Xwindows on any > Pentium (or Pentium class, such as *AMD K6*) faster than 200MHz. It i have a 386dx33 that i'd be happy to put upagainst this lot to prove a point. a 386/486 (with a maths co-processor) at 33 mhz buss speed and 64 mb dram and the same hard disk subsystem .. will street a pentium whatever at teh same buss speed, this being 33 mhz with only 8 or 16 mb dram. most people have been dazzled by teh hundreds in teh speed ratings, all that means is that once a bit of data gets intot eh processing loop it will run around 3 or 4 times faster than it does on teh buss structures, for most user aplications this is irrelevent .. it just looks good and strokes teh ego when you purchase a 'faster machine'. but really, what matters is how fast teh buss works and when tey got to 33 khz in early 1988 that was it. all teh ateps to make 50 mhz buss motherboards failed, at tehis frequency radi interferance from teh processor and the track on teh substrates cause many problems that teh engineers of teh time couldn't solve .. unto 1997-8 when the new intel buss came out a some 37 or just under 40 mhz base clos speed, tehy jumped this up to look like the bus was running at 100 mhz .. i would give my eye teeth for a real 100 mhz buss speed motherboard, but the laws of physics tend to get in the way. basically what i a saying is don't get flustered into think that your hardware won;t perform because it dosnt have all those hundreds plastered all over the bits .. its just advertising hype designed to make you want a new one, because teh manufactures need to sell you one .. to pay the salaries of teh advertising departnment. if you really want to get a new system .. save up and get a real computer, grin, find a pentium pro, 200 mhz, put it in a good motherboard like a supermicro p6sne, add 256 mb pull parity dram, add a aha 2940uw and a matrox millenium with 16 mb dram and yo will have a comuter that will play solitaire reliably and beat anyting intel will produce for consumer usage till teh merced is relaesed, late in 2001 is what i hear, now, i is sure to slip again. on teh other hand you could get a digital alpha atx mother board processor kit, but yo would have to throw eveyting out and thats not the point of teh exercise, is it .. it is t run freebsd on what you have. and freensd will run very well on what you have. if you want to run x windows, sure it will be slow (because it will swap a lot, becaue thier isn;t enoufg system memory). inshort all yo really need to do is to add more memory, at aminium go to 16 mb, but to get good responcive performance think seruously about 32 or if yo can go to 64 mb (most early 386/486 could safley cache 64 mb of onbpoard dram), on other thing get a real maths coprocessor this will hlp as much as getting a memory upgrade. > will be fast enough to just experiment, but I don't think it will be > fast enough to get any work done, and even experimenting will get it is fast enough to be a www server, ftp server, mail host, network server, and host several online users. yes, i beg to differ. we have been conditioned to think that to do more than one task we need more than one machine .. i greu up in novell envrionent hosting os/2 sessions, not bad but not as good as berkeley unix. when ever i needed more processing i added another box to the ethernet chain. i've been using freebsd for aboyut 3 years now and have only just recently realised that 'add anotherbox tot eh chain' is not what the unix philosophy is all about. > tiresome. It will be probably fast enough to experiment with Apache, > but not with very many clients. unless one is getting into serious web serving, being feed by multiple ds3's over copper pair (this is t3's to our americam readers) ... well thats another story. gone are teh days of boutique internet services making to big, though many still harbour that dream, and i am one ... sigh. anyway,as a begineersm and on into small suisness class the out lined machine is more than serviceable, given an aditional maths co-processor and a dram upgrade, and latter a scsi based media storage system with a suitable scsi streamer, qic525 and buyound, not these throwawy toys by hp (formerly colorado). > My shopping list for a production machine would be: > 1. An AMD-K6 (200 MHz or above, K6-2 is ok) or a Celeron 300A (the A > version has cache and *may* be overclocked successfully, if you get one > that Intel hasn't *clock-locked*. I'd get an AGP capable motherboard. > 2. As much memory as you can afford (With a web server and/or Xwindows, > you'll have a *lot* of processes, you don't want to swap any more than > you have to, and memory is pretty damn cheap these days) > 3. At least an 8GB hard drive, I know people run with less, but IDE > disks are cheaper than *dirt*, don't waste your time > 4. For Xwindows, the S3 based cards are the best supported, but I'd > personally go with the recent Matrox G200. See http://www.XFree86.org > for more info. Read their docs, especially the READMEs for each card. > I'd get an AGP card. > > I'm running XFree86 3.3.3 on my 486-66 using a fairly old Hercules > Dynamite Pro 2MB VL-Bus video board and I can't get past 1024x768 @ 256 > colors (I have a crappy monitor on this machine, my only *great* > monitor is still tied to my WindowsNT-OS/2 box and I can't yet pull > it). > > If you shop for a monitor, be sure and get one that's DDC compliant. I > don't know if XFree86 supports DDC compliant devices, but a monitor is if by ddc you mean plug and pray .. my experience has be that same as several of my frinds who still work in teh 'trade' and universally it can be described as 'a bloody nightmare' .. if you want a monitor spend about $3k or $4k and get one good one at 21 inches or so. stay away from those nightmarish ms windows compatible .. they will bite you in all sorts of strange way. i have ne here that can't make its mind about what it is, even a reboot wont help sort outs its confused mind. > a long term investment, and all the other OSes know DDC, which lets the > video board *ask* your monitor what resolutions/refresh rates it > supports, which prevents you from blowing it up by selecting something > it can't handle. > > When you shop around for motherboards (or systems, but I personally > stick with industry standard motherboards and cases, I'll explain > below), you'll notice a price/performance *sweet spot*, that is, say > for example the following prices are found (these are not current > prices, they're ficticious, just to explain my point): > Pentium II 450Mhz for $550 price/perf ratio of 1.2222 > Pentium II 400Mhz for $425 price/perf ratio of 1.0625 > Pentium II 300Mhz* for $250 price/perf ratio of 0.8333 > > *(I don't know if they actually made a 300MHz P2 or not, but > that's entirely besides the point) > > Note the *premium* for the 450MHz model. Divide the price by the MHz tehn multiply it by two to get a real value .. a p6 running at half teh pII adverings department mhz rating will grind it into the dirt in terms o sheer raw processing. thier is one ting that you need to remember the pII were build to make ms windows95 look good. ms complained to intel about what teh p6 did to there flag ship (ms win95) when it was released ... thier was some conflict, the intel p6 is a 32 clean processor made to work with 32 bit clean operating systems like ibm os/2, and ms windows nt and the huge unix market place. ms claimed that ms windows95 was a 32 bit operating system .. it worked at best at half speed, because teh p6 was constaly reverting to 16 bit mode to handle teh 8 bit ms dos operating system that is at teh heart of teh ms windows dos shell, that has 32 bit parts .. so intel took out full page adds (here in australia) apologising for teh 'inconvenience' and suggested atha all teh home users use teh new pII seris processors to get optimum 'performance for thier 32 bit windows applications' and all teh sever based customes should still use teh intel pentium pro products or wait for teh merced to become available. > and you get an idea of the price/performance for that *family*. Note > that you cannot use this price/Mhz method to compare ratios between > processor families, because they have internal architectural > differences that aren't taken into consideration with this method. > Take some current price points for P2's and plot these ratios with a > spreadsheet's graphing capability. You'll see where the *curve* takes a > wicked turn. I avoid the fastest CPU that's currently available > because you have to pay a *big* premium to get it. Buy last years hot > CPU and you'll get it *really* cheap. Spend the money you save on more > memory. this last bit is a godo idea, all computer systems can beneift from more dram, even lowly i386dx33 .. grin. > The reason I avoid pre-built systems, like from Compaq, IBM, etc. is > because they create custom cases and motherboards. If you end up hating > the motherboard that came with it, where do you think you would have to > go to get another motherboard that will fit in that case?? And do you > think it will be a bargain??. If I buy an industry standard motherboard > from ASUS or somebody and I don't like it, I can take the CPU off it > and buy another motherboard, sans CPU for around $100. Kiss > compatibility issues good-bye for $100, I love it. Ditto on the case. > Buy a $37 case now, and later get a tower case for $100, and the > motherboard actually fits!! This is what standards are *supposed* to do > for consumers. Make the industry use standards. Can you imagine buying > toys or appliances and having to buy custom-sized batteries, etc. Screw > that. > > Hope this long winded diatribe helps... no more than mine ... sorta grin > By the way, this question should have been asked in -questions because > it is of a technical nature. You *don't* want to suffer the wrath of > Sue... > > I've removed -newbies and cc'ed -questions... actually these sorts of issues need to be raised in both places. thier is more and more ms windows specific harware coming out that we need to know how to weedle out the bits that work and to be reminded that the latest teh biggest hundreds on a computer speed rating .. is noting more than n teh old days, befre watts rms became teh std in teh hifi world, power ratinf for amplifiers and speakers were rated as pmo and we seversl orders of magnitude larger than teh real (watts rms) power-rating. we in teh computer indusrty are entering just such a phace, well so is my interpretation. > > > Steve Friedrich > Viva la FreeBSD!! > Unix systems measure "uptime" in years, Windows measures it in minutes. regards jonathan an old dog who started in computers when the first pc xt was still a dream. -- =============================================================================== Jonathan Michaels PO Box 144, Rosebery, NSW 1445 Australia ===========================================================<jon@caamora.com.au> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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