johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us (John R. Levine) (12/15/90)
I am looking for a 486 motherboard to replace my burdened Intel 25MHz 386
board. (X windows, uucp, news, and compiles slow it to a crawl.) I'm
running ISC 2.2 Unix with their X, TCP, NFS, etc.
Desiderata:
At least 16MB on board or on a cheap daughterboard
Reasonable amount (64K, say) of secondary cache
Built-in parallel and serial port
EISA, maybe, for future upgradability
I've seen a few boards advertised, but would appreciate reports of experience
with them. If it makes any difference the disk is on an Adaptec 1522B, the
Ethernet is a WD8003, and the screen card is a Paradise super-VGA, probably
upgraded to a WD 8514/A. Both good and bad reports would be appreciated,
particularly from people running similar software. I'd be happy to pay more
for a board that was really reliable than less for one that flakes out from
time to time. A 25 MHz 486 is probably fast enough, though a 33 would be nice
if I can get it without sacrificing reliability. Vendors that give me a month
to send it back if I don't like it would be good, too.
--
John R. Levine, IECC, POB 349, Cambridge MA 02238, +1 617 864 9650
johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us, {ima|spdcc|world}!iecc!johnl
"Typically supercomputers use a single microprocessor." -Boston Globeilan343@violet.berkeley.edu (Geraldo Veiga) (12/15/90)
In article <1990Dec14.214622.9998@iecc.cambridge.ma.us> johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us (John R. Levine) writes: >I am looking for a 486 motherboard to replace my burdened Intel 25MHz 386 >board. (X windows, uucp, news, and compiles slow it to a crawl.) I'm >running ISC 2.2 Unix with their X, TCP, NFS, etc. I am running ISC 2.2 on a trial basis on a 486/25 motherboard by US Tronics (They are promising a 33MHz soon, and EISA later on). It is looks like a cleanly designed board based on a CT chip set. It fetures 128K/512K external cache, Weitek 4167 support, 16M on board, interleaved page mode design. So far I've been running it with 0 problems. Whatever problems I had in the beginning (a week ago) were caused by a defective disk controller. I haven't installed X yet. I am not sure about the pricing for the board alone, but if anyone is interested drop me a line and I send the distributor's info.