** Sender Unknown ** (04/15/91)
OK, since someone wanted to know how much he was going to be in for, and I haven't seen anyone post the information here goes... (This is all from memory, so the numbers may be close, I hope...) motherboard $200 (George and Dave) CPU FPU ICU Free (sampled by Pioneer and NS) EPROM and Clock Free (Dallas Semi NV-RAM and DS1216, check the org line) some sockets leds $40 (Tanners junk parts shop) other parts, Steve $235 (Steve) ST296 80MB drive $350 (Soft Warehouse) case & pwr supply $175 (local wholesale, a friend has an account there...) MacMinix 1.5 $170 (Taylor's Tech. books) total: about $1200 your milage may vary I hear that the CPU FPU ICU go for about $800??? (is it $500?), so expect to pay about $2000 for everything and several hours to solder, several days to debug if you made a mistake, and several weeks/months to collect the parts... Was this close guys? Or is my memory going bad like the battery controller in the first NV-RAM I tried to use (shouldn't try using rejects... 8-(, etc... -- Jon Buller jonb@vector.dallas.tx.us ..!texsun!vector!jonb FROM Fortune IMPORT Quote; FROM Lawyers IMPORT Disclaimer;
maniac@convex.convex.com (04/16/91)
Just after posting the stuff about my costs, I thought some people might want to know a bit about the speed of the board too. NOTE: this is a bad, non-typical load (unless all you do is compute pi 8-) the previously posted (months ago) pi program: TurboC (the one on the market in 6-89) all opts on: ~36 min MSC 6.0 (all opts on): ~15 min Metaware High C & PharLap Dos Ext. (no opts) 2:48 min pc532, minix 1.3, gcc 1.35? (default shipment) 2:56 min pc532, minix 1.3, gcc 1.35? -O 2:26 min the PC tested was a 20MHz 1MB DTK 386. Numbers are as I remember them, not accurate. -- Jon Buller jonb@vector.dallas.tx.us ..!texsun!vector!jonb FROM Fortune IMPORT Quote; FROM Lawyers IMPORT Disclaimer;
rhyde@maris.ucr.edu (randy hyde) (04/17/91)
My costs: PCB - 200 CPU etc. - 550 ttl & parts (thanks, Steve, I still haven't sent the goodies back): $360 memory - $200 (4 megs so far, I'm waiting for 4mbyte simms to come down) Disk drive - $800 (330 mbyte Miniscribe) Case & pwr supply - 80 Minix - $170 (egghead, though I haven't bought it yet) This is probably the bare minimum: about $2,500 (with solder and all) I also bought lots of EPROMs and an EPROM programmer for another $200 (so I could try writing my own monitor, I'm still working on it). I lucked out (or was unlucky, depending on how you want to look at it) and picked up a second board around here for $600 incl all TTL, CPU/FPU/ICU. Most everything except sockets and RAM (sockets for TTL, that is). Total cost $600. Both boards pretty much worked right after assembly (parity still doesn't work on one of the boards, the other had an initial probably because I didn't seat the SIMMs well). All told, I've probably invested $3,500 in both boards (still have one case and disk drive to go, plus 32 megs of RAM when 4 mbyte simms come down in price). Gee- I could'a bought a NeXT! Oh well, the 32532 chip is a lot more fun than the 68040, even if it is slower (btw, I program mostly in assembly ` language, and there are few machines as nice to program in assembly as the 32000. That is the whole reason I bought into this system). *** Randy Hyde
wilker@descartes.math.purdue.edu (Clarence Wilkerson) (04/17/91)
Re: Randy Hyde's comments about the 68040. Are there any barebones 68040 projects out there? It looks like the first 680x0 chip for which there would be any point ( bang for buck) to doing a project of the nature of the pc532. Clarence Wilkerson
maniac@convex.convex.com (04/17/91)
> the PC tested was a 20MHz 1MB DTK 386. Numbers are as I remember them, not > accurate. Oops, the word necessarily should be inbetween 'not' and 'accurate'. I believe the numbers are accurate in spirit, if not absolute terms... -- Jon Buller jonb@vector.dallas.tx.us ..!texsun!vector!jonb FROM Fortune IMPORT Quote; FROM Lawyers IMPORT Disclaimer;