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Computer Info

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February 24, 1997

January 4, 1997

This page just has some computer information and links.  The links are primarily where I find computer information and where I buy my hardware/compare prices.  The information is primarily stuff that I gathered in making a new PC purchase over the past few months.

My Computer

Below I have the price I paid for the component as well as a description of why it fit my needs the best and caveats.  Most of my system was purchased from GrumpMicro. This includes the case, mobo, chip, heat sink/fan, ram, floppy drive, and mouse. The service was good and prompt for the most part and their prices were very good.  I ordered my sound card, speakers, and surge protector from NECX.  Where I got/am getting my video card(s) is complicated.

$125 Shuttle HOT-603 Mobo - I needed a Socket 7 board, and this was hyped to be the best.  Running with the AMD 640 chipset (AMD's version of the VIA VP2) it had all the best features of Intel's HX and TX chipsets.   Unlike the FIC PA-2007, the Shuttle board also claimed to support 83 MHz bus speeds.  It's a good board.  It's stable at 66 MHz bus speeds and has 3 DIMM slots.  Even with only one DIMM slot occupied, it's flakey unacceptably flakey at 75 and 83 MHz.  The 1 MB of cache is nice, although I guess I wouldn't really notice it.   It has sort of been bastardized by Shuttle, however, and drivers/ support seems scant.  For some reason, my PCI bridge drivers seem to require IRQ 9.  I have not yet tried the VP2 bus-mastering drivers.  Otherwise, it's a good board.
$200 AMD K6 200 MHz - I wanted to save a few hundred dollars and get good performance.   The K6 has been very good, and ran well at 225 MHz at 2.9v core.  Of course, this can probably be attributed to adequate chip cooling
$25 Heat Sink / Fan - GrumpMicro calls this the "HUGE" heatsink/fan combo.  I can't really disagree with the description.   It is a very large Thermoalloy heat sink mounted by a large fan.  I knew I wanted a good heatsink/fan combo, and the only thing I could think of that might be better would be the IERC unit available at SDS Mark.
$250 NEC 64 MB 10ns SDRAM DIMM - I had thought I was only getting 2 DIMM slots (I got 3) so I wanted to make them count.  At the time, 32 MB DIMMs were going for about $110-$115, and 64 MBs were going for about $350, so when I spotted this for a hundred bucks left I went for it.  Supposedly a single DIMM would be better for overclocking as well, but I was getting a host of irregular blue screens.
   


My new computer (probably from Codata):