mcneill@cpsc.ucalgary.ca (William Mcneill) (02/22/90)
I'm thinking of rolling my own 33Mhz 386 or 486 box. Where can a person get honest motherboard performance ratings? Is there anyone who could share any experiences with home building PCs. Thanks
bbesler@vela.acs.oakland.edu (Brent Besler) (02/24/90)
>I'm thinking of rolling my own 33Mhz 386 or 486 box. Where can a >person get honest motherboard performance ratings? Is there anyone who >could share any experiences with home building PCs. My dad and I put a 20 Mhz Jameco 386 motherboard into an XT clone box. The 165 watt XT power supply works as did all of the old cards, except the hard disk controller. We had a noname serial/parallel port car, an ATI EGA Wonder, and an Omnitel internal 2400 baud modem. All work fine. We put in a Western Digital 10006 VSR2(1:1 interleave RLL hard/floppy controller). Jameco just released a 33 Mhz 386 board with a 32K static cache for $1200 with 0K memory. I highly recommned the WD controller also. I would buy as many parts as possible from the same place. Jameco has good prices on power supplies, motherboards, and the serial/parallel cards. Memory, video card, monitors, and hard disks can be found elsewhere for much better prices. Brent H. Besler
cschenk@dgis.dtic.dla.mil (Cliff Schenk) (02/27/90)
mcneill@cpsc.ucalgary.ca (William Mcneill) writes: >I'm thinking of rolling my own 33Mhz 386 or 486 box. Where can a >person get honest motherboard performance ratings? Is there anyone who >could share any experiences with home building PCs. >Thanks MIPS magazine, Sept 1989 Vol 1 #9, compared the Mylex MX386-33, Micronics 386/33, Micronics 386/25, and the AMI Mark II motherboards. They ran Dhrystone 2, Whetstones, Linpack, and Livermore Loops under Unix, OS/2, DOS/x. In addition they ran workloads with four types of applications; software development, engineering/scientific, finacial, and publishing on the same three OS environments. There conclusions -- under DOS extenders no single board stood out, hence choose the least expensive board -- Micronics. Under Xenix the Micronics board came in at slightly slower speeds on the AIM tests, however it was concluded that the price difference overshadowed the nominal performance difference. The Micronics board was slightly faster on tests they ran under OS/2. The Mylex board offered the greatest number of user-configurable options through jumpers and PALS. BTW has anyone had any experiences with the MPT 386/33 MHZ mother board made by SOYO. I called a local computer dealer who is offering a 386/33 MHZ configuration identical to the Gateway 2000 for about $350 less. However, it probably isn't worth it if I can't find reassuring information on the speed and reliability of this motherboard. Cliff ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Clifford K. Schenk MILNET cschenk@dev.dtic.dla.mil Control Data Corporation UUCP ..!uunet!dev!cschenk ----------------------------------------------------------------------------