From: pcg@aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Subject: Re: EISA/VLB Motherboards Date: Sun, 1 Aug 1993 16:49:57 GMT
>>> On Thu, 29 Jul 1993 16:20:10 GMT, fenk@agora.rain.com (John Fenk) said:
John> scooper@willow.ucsc.edu (Scott Cooper) writes:
Scott> I recently consulted a local linux guru about what kind of system
Scott> I should put together, and he reccomended an EISA motherboard,
Almost totally useless, unless you really plan to have huge machine with
lots of users...
Scott> also adding that a VLB display adapter was probably best.
Yeah, it *would* be if only the display adapter's memory were accessed
over the VL bus in linear mode, which it is not (yet). And then the
benefit is large only for displaying images.
Scott> Assuming that they _do_ work fine, what is the consensus on which
Scott> VLB video cards eke out the highest performance from XFree86?
As of now the best bet is to get a standard ISA motherboard, preferably
one with a SIS chipset (SIS chipsets handle memory much better than most
others, especially OPTi, and by 100-200%), an Adaptec 154x (or
equivalent, like BusLogic 54x) SCSI controller, and any ISA S3-801 based
VGA card, e.g. ther Actix one.
The XS3 server that work with the rest of XFree86 1.3 is amazingly fast,
and 801 based cards have the best perofmance short of the 928 based ones
that cost much more. Their only limitation is that the maximum
resolution supported is 1024x768 (to leave 256KB of memory to the S3
cache), which probably is not a great limitation.
Otherwise a Cirrus 5426 based card is 2nd best, then an ET4000 card is
3rd best.
John> I have the Genoa 8500 VLB. This is NOT the fastest, but it works
John> (with Xfree 1.3), is reasonably cheap and my dealer had it in
John> stock.
The Genoa has a Cirrus 5426 chipset, if I remember well, which is
(potentially) accelated as well as VLB. Unfortunately XFree86, for the
time being, handles it as a standard ISA unaccelerated VGA card. in the
future this will change.