usenet@nlm.nih.gov (usenet news poster) (05/31/91)
A friend asked me the following question. He is about to buy either one of two systems, a 386/33 with an EISA bus, or a 486/25 with a normal AT bus. The question arises as to which of two features is of more use in the next year or two: the built-in coprocessor of the 486 or the wider bus of EISA? Does font management under Windows work any better with a coprocessor? Is there any hardware that requires EISA yet? (as there are at least three boards that require IBM's MicroChannel) Any predictions as to near term trends.
korsmana@qucis.queensu.CA (Anthony Korsman) (06/05/91)
Hi, The choice between the two is dependent on the type of work you will be doing with the machine: If you are planing on using it for floating point and memory intensive work then the choice would be the 486/25/ISA. But, if your work is more I/O intensive or does not use the FPU(floating point unit) then the 386/33/EISA is by far the better choice. There are several manufactures out there that make disk cache/controller boards for the EISA which will justify the EISA bus on its own. I know of at least one TIGA graphics board for the EISA(bus bandwidth is very important when doing graphics). I'm sure there are more. There is almost an order of magnitude difference in the bandwidth between the ISA(AT bus) and EISA buses, not to mention all the other benefits(eg bus mastering) of the EISA. The EISA bus is actually even fast than the MicroChannel if the was ever a consideration. As well, if you pick a mother board that has a separate CPU module then you will be able to upgrade in the future to a faster CPU, if the FPU is needed. As for your question on Windows font manager. I very much doubt that the FPU would be of any use, but I could be wrong. -:) Just my opinion. Anthony Korsman Queen's University Kingston, Ontario, Canada