Wanna go to a computer show?

[rlk at alum.mit.edu (Robert L Krawitz)]

   From: Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org>
   Date: Tue, 14 May 2002 15:07:13 -0400

   > > I'm curious as to what is a hellafastmegasystem these days.  
   > 
   > I was just joking.  I'm not looking to melt a hole in the floor

   Topoftheline is, as always, expensive, but dollars spent on new
   hardware today can be very impressive.

   A coworker just put together a personal reasonablyfastsystem (a cheap
   MSI everything board, 512MB PC133 RAM, dual 60 GB RAID 1ed Maxtor
   drives, Athlon XP 1800+ CPU)

My one comment about that is that DDR memory (running at 266 MHz)
offers a lot of bang for the buck; there are some nice cheap
motherboards (ECS K7S5A or something like that) that will do this.
For anything that busts cache (and 256K is a really tiny cache by the
standards of today's working sets), the doubled memory bandwidth can
really help.  DDR isn't much more expensive than PC133 DRAM, and a
small step down in processor speed (to 1700+, say) should about break
even.

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rlk at alum.mit.edu>      http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/

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