[tech] (fwd) fs:(Melb) Penitum 200MMX (Socket 7)

Grahame Bowland gbowland at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au
Mon Oct 30 11:51:45 WST 2000


On Mon, Oct 30, 2000 at 11:35:54AM +0800, David Manchester wrote:
> > On Mon, 30 Oct 2000, Nick Bannon wrote:
> > 
> > > On Mon, Oct 30, 2000 at 02:10:15AM +0800, Grahame Bowland wrote:
> > > > Looks pretty good. How does this compare to the equivalent processor from 
> > > > CS for $300 with all the trimmings? We could grab one of those and make it 
> > > > mermaid, and then use the current mermaid as a console box?
> 
> Broken broken broken.
> Mermaid's currently in a rack-mount case.
> The motherboard is best for a server.
> Why?
> 
> 6 SIMM slots and an HX chipset, which will actually let us cache >64MB
> and do parity for us, or ECC if we use parity RAM.
> 
> > > Probably simpler to swap some bits and not bother reboxing, etc - the
> > > CPU and perhaps two 8MB for two 16MB SIMMs, making mermaid a 96MB
> > > P200-MMX and other a 48MB P133/P150. (was mermaid's CPU swapped to get
> > > rid of the FPU errors?  Last I remember it was running at 150MHz)
> 
> Yes, quite.
> The CPU's currently a P133 because of the FPU errors.
> Shame, as those P150s are neat as they'll run 2*75, but that
> one seems to have suffered when mermaid overheated. *shrug*
> Although as is mentioned below by James, the CS ones use DIMMs.
> 
> > IIRC, the CS PCs had PC100 SDRAM, which comes in a DIMM. While you might
> > be able to use SDRAM in mermaid, depending on the motherboard, it's very
> > dodgy to use DIMMs and SIMMs at the same time.
> 
> Yeah, that too. Beware that these will probably have PC66 DIMMs
> so we want to keep the RAM together... rather than swap it into
> mussel/new motherboards.

It's PC100 from the information I've been given.

> Grahame - what became of purchasing those CPUs?
> Last I heard, we were all set to buy the ones from Craig, so I thought
> I'd temper that fervour somewhat with other prices.
> Then these P200MMXes came up & no-one's said boo, bar Nick about the
> new Celeron machines. 
> We've got a meeting tomorrow... are we going to do anything before
> then & report back, or are we going to slog it out some more tomorrow
> night?

I don't have too much time to chase this around ATM (wrestling with my tax 
return and trying to get study done. :) We have prices on the different options,
I think the next logical action is to authorise expenditure.

I think a couple of the P200 boxen would be great if we can afford it. They 
seem particularly good to me because they include decent monitors. Sure, they 
are small but they ought to be useable. PC100 RAM is useful, and they have 
reasonable disks. All in all decent Linux/Windows console boxes. 

We're getting those Celeron motherboards, aren't we? So we need to get the RAM 
organised and a couple of P3s. I thought we were going with the computerman 
P3/600s because they were cheaper? As for disks for the Celeron boxes we can 
either buy a couple of 10Gb IDE drives or find some SCSI cards and feed them 
the hard disks from the Suns. I'm close to having them on a diskless setup, as 
soon as I figure out the NetBSD bootp stuff.

Old slow seagate drives in the Celeron's doesn't really make sense though :)

Cheers,
Grahame




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