[No Subject]

[JIM GRUPE]

If I may comment on your PC plans....
 Don't get a 486DX66, but a 486DX50. ANd skip the EISA, and use the
VLB for everything you can. Try for a three slot local bus, but be sure
you have at least 2.
 Now, the whys: Local bus gives you faster I/O than anything,
including EISA and SCSI-II, and its a lot simpler and a lot cheaper.
ONce you go local bus, you could get I/O to your hard drive as rates up
to 66MB/sec. Theoretic max with EISA is way short of that!! Even fast
SCSI only comes up to about 60MB/s, and rarely achieves anyhting close.
 With local bus, your cards run at the clock speed of the cpu, not the
backplan bus speed. The speed of the "turbo" bus is a measely 8MHz.
With a DX2-66, the clock speed is still only 33MHz, and "doubled" insid
the cpu. With a DX50, you use a clock of 50MHz. Now work out the
numbers: Your I/O to disk and Video is 50% faster than a DX2-66, and
you've sacrificed only 32% in cpu speed. Unless you're really doing
some number crunching matchmatics, heavy ACAD or something, your cpu is
mostly idle waiting for I/O anyway. As an added bonus, the DX50 chip is
a little cheaper than the DX2-66.  Scrapping the EISA will save you
another $100 or so. That's $200 you can put into your HD!
 I should point out, in case it has excaped you, that both EISA and SCSI
use the backplane bus speed of 8MHZ. tsk, tsk.
 Work out the numbers for yourself. It makes no sense to get a DX2-66!
And why use EISA for the HD, when the drives and controllers cost 50%
more and run at less than half the speed of their IDE/local bus
counterparts????  Some food for thought, I hope!
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