[ale] Buying a new motherboard

[Andy]

Eric wrote:
> 
> I've got some cash burning a hole in my wallet and have been hunting
> around for a new motherboard to upgrade my 486-66.  I want to go with a
> some sort of pentium class chip and motherboard, but Amy has nixed the
> Dual Pentium idea...
> 
> Anyway, what I've been looking at is ordering a Cyrix 6x86 120mhz (P150+)
> CPU, a Tyan Titan III motherboard, and 32 MB of EDO RAM  through one of
> two mail order places ASA computers (http://www.asacomputers.com) or
> Computer Bay (http://www.computerbay.com).
> 
> I've heard that the Titan III motherboard is fast (Triton Chipset) and
> has the architecture to take advantage of the goodies in the Cyrix
> chip. It's got 4 pci slots and 5 ISA slots, and 6 SIMM slots.  It is
> compatible with the Cyrix 6x86 (from the Cyrix Home page) and I've heard
> of people running Linux on this setup.  The 'catches' are that you have
> to replace the bios w/ a shareware bios called MR BIOS, and that you
> have to have a board rev >=5 and a COAST module >=1.5.
> 
> Anyone have any good/bad opinions on this setup before I send my hard earned
> money off to who knows where in California?  Has anyone on the list
> dealt with these mail order companies before?  They both have about the
> best price I could find, and Tyan warranties their motherboards for 2
> years.  The price would be about $410 for the 6x86 P150+ and the
> motherboard.
> 
> -Eric.


are you running IDE/NCR SCSI or Adaptec? Also you might want to look into 
the Triton-2(430-HX) Chipset which is much faster that the Triton (430-FX).
The Triton-2 supports Concurrnet PCI, Peer to Peer PCI, Univeseral Serial Bus(USB),
Turbo Read Pipelining, ECC Memory, 768MBRAM, )I have  Super Micro Triton-2 
(they have 8 non-shared slots4 PCI 4ISA ) boards at my job that blows away 
anything I have seen the Titan II included. 
I havent tested the Titan III yet though we should be getting a few  in a week or so.
It also has 8 usable slots (9 actually but one shared).  The main thing you want to 
look for on a new Motherboard at this time is support for Universeral Serial Bus(USB)
support. This will be replacing com ports and parallel ports in the near future and
by next year this time all boards will be coming with USB. The ability to connect
64 devices to one port (printers,scanners,modems,drives,etc.) Transfer rate is said
to be over 5-10MB per second. 

Here are some of the features of the newer SuperMicro Triton-2 boards for reference.
use these to compare with other High performance boards.
	(SuperMicro Triton-2)
	CPU Support  	PentiumP54C,P55C,Klamath/6x86/5k86/6k86 90-200+ Mhz
	Memory		FastPageMode/EDO/ECC(Error Correction and Control) to 768MB
			6 memory slots
	Chipset 	Intel Triton-2 430-HX with Intel Piix BusMaster controller
			Concurrent PCI, Peer To Peer PCI, USB
	Bus		Fully independent PCI bus 8 slots non-shared all 8 usable
	Enhanced IDE	Busmaster modes 0-4, Type F DMA
	I/O		National Super I/O Epp,ECP, Hi-speed Serial, Infra-red,
	Thermal		System overheat Thermal control. (triggers back-up fan 
			When temp exeeds threshold
	BIOS 		AMI Bios FlashWinBios
	
	
			../andy