On that box in question, it is a an Intel Xeon 700 quad CPU board. Xeon bus speeds are capped at 100Mhz, and use 100Mhz SDRAM DIMMS for memory. Even though the bus speed is much lower than AMD's 266FSB, the true 32-bit optimization of the Xeon family (combined with a L2 cache that is 4 to 32 times larger than a regular PC's) make it perform quite a bit faster usually, as long as you don't run any kind of 16-bit code.
Don't get me wrong though - I love AMD on PC's. They just don't make server-class hardware yet. They keep saying they will though. I'm an OS and app guy, not a hardware guy, so if you need more indepth info I may have to start defering to someone who spends all their days on the workbench...
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td><b>Quote</b> </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE"><!--QuoteEBegin-->I didn't mean to sound like I was mad, as I wasn't. I just thought the 'SCSI is overrated' comment was pretty silly and rather wrong. IDE is the overrated architecture.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span id='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Amusingly, SCSI's used for a lot of lower-end stuff as well, and can pop up in surprising places.
I've got three 'SCSI' devices attached to my PC - an old Zip drive (SCSI over parallel), a digital camera (SCSI over USB), and an ATAPI CD-ROM drive (SCSI over IDE, of all things).
IDE's really crude and primitive, while SCSI's got all sorts of funky message-passing stuff...
If you're bottlenecking on a PC Legion, it's usually at the disk and its controller. It's pretty hard to flood a bus, as the disk seeks have a hard time dealing up data fast enough to bottleneck other components. More RAM can help (and in Windows XP you can finally get rid of your pagefile all together and still be stable, if you have the RAM).
I never really went into that aspect, HMTGAAMEA. But you're right. IDE as an architecture hasn't really improved very much (except in bus speed) in 20 years. The most perverse aspect is the bigger an IDE drive you get (and thusly the newer), the <i>slower</i> it gets, as there is so much more data density on the platters for the heads to have to read/write from.
<!--QuoteBegin--Legionnaired+July 18 2002,18:16--></span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td><b>Quote</b> (Legionnaired @ July 18 2002,18:16)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE"><!--QuoteEBegin-->EDIT: Oh, and SONO, make it look something like this...
C:\1 gig windows D:\500 meg fix size swap file (make sure it's on a different hard drive, not just a logical partition, it'll run faster) E:\18.5 gig apps F&G:\30 gigs each<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span id='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> Not exactly that is weird on my system. The C and D would be one 30 Gig hd. so C 1GB and D 28 GB (games) (woops had the wrong number) The E and F would be the second drive, two partitions, 30 Gig each (E= apps, F= mass-storage, maybe the E would be smaller, about 20 gig and the F than 40) The G is one single small harddisk with 10 GB, so I would take this one as a backup or a fast transport storage. Maybe I could put the 10 gig drive in a changing frame.
Well whatever you do, make sure you put your faster swap file on your faster HD,
EDIT: Oh, and I use old-skoo FDisk <!--emo&:)--><img src="http://www.natural-selection.org/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':)'><!--endemo-->
Comments
Don't get me wrong though - I love AMD on PC's. They just don't make server-class hardware yet. They keep saying they will though. I'm an OS and app guy, not a hardware guy, so if you need more indepth info I may have to start defering to someone who spends all their days on the workbench...
Probably not though, RAM access speeds are in the nano-seconds last I checked.
Amusingly, SCSI's used for a lot of lower-end stuff as well, and can pop up in surprising places.
I've got three 'SCSI' devices attached to my PC - an old Zip drive (SCSI over parallel), a digital camera (SCSI over USB), and an ATAPI CD-ROM drive (SCSI over IDE, of all things).
IDE's really crude and primitive, while SCSI's got all sorts of funky message-passing stuff...
Having a mod and then having a work in progress beta version of it takes up a lot of space too.
I never really went into that aspect, HMTGAAMEA. But you're right. IDE as an architecture hasn't really improved very much (except in bus speed) in 20 years. The most perverse aspect is the bigger an IDE drive you get (and thusly the newer), the <i>slower</i> it gets, as there is so much more data density on the platters for the heads to have to read/write from.
Oh, and I'll definently be saving up for something to replace the 12 gig BIGFOOT in the beta computer.
C:\1 gig windows
D:\500 meg fix size swap file (make sure it's on a different hard drive, not just a logical partition, it'll run faster)
E:\18.5 gig apps
F&G:\30 gigs each<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span id='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Not exactly that is weird on my system.
The C and D would be one 30 Gig hd. so C 1GB and D 28 GB (games) (woops had the wrong number)
The E and F would be the second drive, two partitions, 30 Gig each (E= apps, F= mass-storage, maybe the E would be smaller, about 20 gig and the F than 40)
The G is one single small harddisk with 10 GB, so I would take this one as a backup or a fast transport storage.
Maybe I could put the 10 gig drive in a changing frame.
Nope, I didn't start that.
EDIT: Oh, and I use old-skoo FDisk <!--emo&:)--><img src="http://www.natural-selection.org/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':)'><!--endemo-->