From owner-freebsd-hardware Mon Jun 7 20:11:20 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Received: from super-g.inch.com (super-g.com [207.240.140.161]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F32A314C82 for ; Mon, 7 Jun 1999 20:10:31 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from spork@super-g.com) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by super-g.inch.com (8.8.8/8.8.5) with SMTP id XAA06851; Mon, 7 Jun 1999 23:09:57 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 23:09:57 -0400 (EDT) From: spork X-Sender: spork@super-g.inch.com To: Michael Remski Cc: jin@george.lbl.gov, freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Motherboard Upgrades In-Reply-To: <375BDFA1.3CA0@lmco.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org I've found two cheap upgrades so far: DFI mobo, K6-in-your-price-range, PC100 DIMMS. I paid about $190 to go from a Pentium-133 on an aging ASUS T2P4 to an AMD K6-350, and the K6-II's just keep dropping weekly. I got 4 PCI, 3 ISA, and one AGP (later sprung for a Rage 128 AGP card for $60) slots. The DFI has a very nice build quality that looks nicer than some of the older ASUS boards we have. I've got two of these for workstations so far (home/work) and haven't had any problems. The second was an experiment to see how much I could "recycle" an Asus T2P4. I simply bought a $55 K6-350 and dropped it in. There are some undocumented jumper settings that bring the voltage down to 2.2V for the AMD, the bus can be clocked to 75MHz, and one scary mod lets you up the CPU multiplier enough to get it running at 333MHz @ 75MHz bus. So far, so good, it's doing a buildworld tonight. The mod is simply jumpering two pins of the cpu together to increase the multiplier. You can see detailed instructions at http://members.xoom.com/upgrademan/t2p4site/main.html. For $60, it's not too shabby. My $0.02, Charles --- Charles Sprickman spork@super-g.com --- "...there's no idea that's so good you can't ruin it with a few well-placed idiots." On Mon, 7 Jun 1999, Michael Remski wrote: > Well, following a bit of traffic on the lists, the VIA chipsets on the > FIC seem to have some "issues". I wasn't sure how any of them would > affect me, but the ASUS seemed to have gotten a lot of good press, so > that was an influence. Expandability was not a big issue for me, my > system is all SCSI, FreeBSD only, so all I needed as a couple of PCI > slots and a couple ISA (NIC). A K6-III/400 with 128 MB PC100 SDRAM was > a reasonably priced package. I'm not disagreeing with anything you've > said, I was merely trying to report that in my instance, for the price > and the ease of replacement (really only an hour of my time, including a > couple of reboots to get the CMOS clock setting right), that I felt it > was a good deal. > > > thanks for sharing your view. > > mike > > -- > "You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike" > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message