gichan@blake.u.washington.edu (Gilbert Chan) (08/29/90)
I'm forwarding the following article for a friend, PLEASE send all your responses/flames to him at bchan@ddn-eur.ddn.mil, Thank you -------------------------------------------------------------------- I posted an inquiry on "more memory vs an 80387" to run X a few days ago. I guess I didn't make myself clear; The correct query should have been "16 Megs of RAM vs 8 Megs + 80387". Well that hardly matters. I received many replies. (I stopped counting after 10.) The consenses were unanimous. Get the MEMORY! Most netters agreed the math chip would help the arc drawing but not much more under X. One netter even said the 80387 was overrated. Humm...I am going to take an exception to the last statement. My old beast (4.77 Mhz) has a 8087. I ran some benchmarks (Matlabs) on it against my 33-386 w/64K cache (with 8087 emulation). To my surprises, the old beast actually ran actually faster than the 386 in most tests. So while the 80387 may not be that useful under X, it does has its place. The list of names was simply too long. Rather to thank everyone and my wife individually; I will express my gratitude here. "Thank you all". Net is great, isn't it? Regards, Brian Chan. Stuttgart, West Germany. email: bchan@ddn-eur.dec.mil