posted 06-01-99 12:46 AM ET            

768 Megs RAM, Matrox MilleniumII w/16 MB, Viewsonic P815 21 inch monitor, All Ultra Wide SCSI drives (24 Gig across 4 HDD) on an Ultra2 Wide SCSI bus, plus SCSI DVD, Turtle Beach sound card, serious Bose speakers.

I don't have a single piece of ISA or IDE garbage on my computer, except the stinkin floppy.

posted 06-01-99 06:02 AM ET            

When you get your "better one", would you mind giving me your old piece of junk, I'd love to replace my P100/24MB RAM/2GB HD...

posted 06-01-99 02:12 PM ET            

K6-2 300Mhz, 32 MB RAM, 2.1 GB disk, 32 x CD-ROM.

posted 06-01-99 02:59 PM ET            

Michael:
What on God's sweet earth do you need such a powerful system for!?! You running a web server or doing CAD or what?? Using it as ground control for the Space Shuttle?? Or did you win it in a raffle??
PS: ISA modems are way more reliable than PCI... hehe

Aredhran:
How do you put up with SMAC on a P100? I had a P133 with 40Mb and SMAC ran soooo slowly with large maps (and in the Design Workshop) that I levered open my hermetically sealed savings account and flashed out �600 on a PII 450 with 128Mb (but nothing else of any interest, sadly )

posted 06-01-99 06:40 PM ET         

I'm also going to inquire exactly why the heck you need such a godawfully powerful system. "Better one"? Is there such a thing?

Considering I'm a VB-Designer I can't see what on earth you could use all that power for. I run on a sleazy Pentium 200 with 64 megs o' RAM and an old (really old) 1.3 HD (okay, it's actually two drives, a 500 master and a 800 slave... stop laughing!) And I can program, compile and do everything else just fine.

Also, watch your tounge when you say "ISA/IDE Garbage." PCI may be bigger, but I've learned the hard way that old garbage is hell of alot more stable than new-fangled gadgets

posted 06-01-99 11:44 PM ET            

Nell - I do several things, the 768MB RAM serves two purposes - I do use it for Photoshop of hi-res images, and ray tracing work sometimes, and I otherwise set up for normal apps with Windoze VM management (swap file) disabled, to make things run with more stability.

Other than the Photoshop/Ray Tracing stuff,
I do development on intelligent process control apps (for electric power plants), I do hard core process and economic modeling, I play with AI development, and I play games.

Size does count, and it can never be big enough or fast enough. But seriously, I do bring even this beast to its knees with some of the stuff I do. I have a couple more lying around, mere PII 400's, which I use for runtime rendering of the ray-traced stuff, or client-server testing and process control simulation to test my apps.

Nell - PCI is the ISA of the future - when the PC200 bus works reliably and becomes standard, PCI won't have enough bandwidth, and will become the orphan standard for old legacy crap from the late 90's. ISA has been around since '83 - it's time to kill it off and put a stake in its heart. Besides, it was invented by IBM, and I used to work there, so I won't allow it in my machine.

posted 06-02-99 02:44 AM ET            

I'm only running on:
PentiumIII 400 MHz system,
128 Meg Ram,
8 Gig HD,
32x SCSI II CD-ROM,
Ricoh SCSI II CD-RW,
16 Meg Monster VooDoo II 3-D Accellerator Card,
SoundBlaster 64-Awe,
21" Relisys monitor,
with an Iomega Zip-100 External.

I was embarassed that my Laptop was better than my (previous) REAL home system, so I finally upgraded. Almost got dual 400's for the bragging rights, but my system is ALREADY better than what we use to run all of our/NASA's Web Servers at base, and better than half of the Data-base servers. Sad but true... Besides, I don't do enough data modelling or ray tracing to justify that much power, nor run on a OS that would use Parallel processors well.

My next home system will probably be a GigHz speed system, unless something serious goes wrong. That will only be in a few years...

MtG! Gotta love that Aquazone. I run it at work as a "purdy" background. You missed Oddballz though in your listing of PFM Virtual Animal family (Catz and Dogz). You keeping up with 9003 and its future products (Pinta - The parrots/birds, Power Guppy Breeders, and Goldfish packages)? Another ALife "game" to look for would be El-Fish. It uses the digital seed to generate the fish's look from various angles...

3D Acceleration doesn't help on SMAC graphics. And a serious sound card is mostly wasted... but you can generally say that most high end machines are wasted on home apps that aren't serious graphic packages so...

posted 06-02-99 04:03 AM ET            

Some of the graphics I do really need that kind of power, but the process control apps are almost as bad when I'm testing them - I have one PII set up as a server, to send 80 to 110 channels of emulated data in real time over A/D data acquisition devices, to test the decision making and evaluation modules of my apps. My other PII is a dedicated runtime victim for ray tracing renderings.

What do you think of the PIII so far in terms of performance? I just got the 250 MB USB version of the Zip (external) plus I've got internal 1 GB Jaz's on everything. The new Zip is nice, but to me the verdict is still out on USB. Wish people would wake up and realize SCSI-III is the way to go - my SCSI chains have I, II and III devices on it. It's a real pain in the ass with my scanner, since I know it would be faster if it wasn't choking on that SCSI-I bus. You'd think HP would know better by now. Ah, the need for speed. If I ever have to wait for it, it's too damned slow.

posted 06-02-99 05:11 AM ET            

Actually unless you run servers which can take advantage of the superior multitasking abilities of SCSI Controllers and has need for more than 8 devices your credits is totally wasted on SCSI.

Yep your 10000RPM state of the art SCSI system can render that image 0.987 seconds faster than a similar system with a good 7200RPM IDE disk but at a premium price.

You started

posted 06-02-99 02:50 PM ET            

Hey Dev -

SCSI-3 and Ultra2Wide is not that much more expensive - about $50 to $75 per drive, depending on capacity, plus the controller, which is a bit expensive. ($300 or so) Certainly not ten times, even if you have a very simple system with one drive and a CD-ROM and nothing more.

As far as what people can afford, that's not the point here in this thread, but as Dirty Harry said "A man's got to know his limitations." People have different budgets and priorities, but that has nothing to do with the relative quality or functionality of the technology. I'd much rather have a serious top end SGI workstation for my ray tracing stuff, but I don't do enough ray tracing work to justify the cost, so I use what I have. Everyone does what they can afford, or justify to themselves. But a lot of us on this forum work in or around the computer industry, and live and die on what our computers can do.

Now to the rant on the superiority of SCSI:

proc.SCSIRANT()
Lessee - IDE, 2 channels, two devices each, only primary master is bootable, separate interrupts and windows resources for CD-ROM and DVD, etc. Better hope you don't have too many things on your computer, otherwise Windoze Plug and Pray (tm) will freak out and either run out of or conflict resources.

SCSI - up to 16 devices, internal, external, any type, any bootable device can be designated as a boot device with no sweat. You can run 2, 3, or 4 OS'es cleanly with no collision, you can hook Scanners and other stuff into your SCSI bus, add and change devices with no sweat, etc. You can also have tape backups, Zip and Jaz type drives, film scanners, and all sorts of neat stuff.

Resource settings under Windows, or device drivers? What's that? It's all handled very simply by the SCSI Bios. System BIOS upgrades for new technology - remember when large IDE drives first came out, and you had to get BIOS upgrades, or run flaky device drivers? Not with SCSI - it's all in a separate BIOS.

Need to change or upgrade your HDD - a pain with IDE - go in there, flip the jumper on the old drive to make it a two drive master, then flip the jumper on the new drive to make it a slave, then copy the stuff, the flip jumpers again, blah, blah, blah.

With SCSI - put it in, copy the stuff, yank the old one - about four keystrokes later you're up and running on your new boot drive.

Reliability? - the industry wide failure rate on SCSI HDD's is way less than half that for IDE.

Speed - not even comparable for HDDs - latency and seek time, half to 2/3's of IDE.
Max data transfer rate for one device - SCSI Ultra2 Wide is about 15 times faster than IDE, SCSI Ultra Wide about 8 times. The max transfer rate across the entire bus is even faster.

With the new generation of PC100 CPU's, IDE is already the biggest performance choke point. In the current generation of games, telephony, multimedia, etc., A PII 300 with SCSI II (cheaper than SCSI-3 or Ultra2Wide) is faster overall than a PII 400 with IDE, and probably costs about the same, all other components being equivalent.

With the PIII and the eventual P200 bus, the extreme bottleneck from IDE will be more obvious. IDE has also run its course in terms of the maximum improvement that can be milked out of it, while SCSI still has at least one more generations of improvement in it, and is already so far ahead except in price.

Full screen, uncompressed 30+ fps video - no prob with SCSI. Real time video capture? Again, SCSI rules. Work with graphics or any large file, or swap file intensive apps? SCSI is far superior. My biggest graphics images I work with are 10 by 15 inch, 720 dpi, 24 bit color. Individual file sizes in excess of 100 meg. IDE bleeds, (I tested it just for fun), SCSI laughs. Even with lots of 2 and 3 meg images, not uncommon in Photoshop, the superiority of SCSI is huge.

With the coming schizophrenia of Windoze 95.2 and NT 4.1 (oooops, I meant all those confusingly named versions of Windoze 2000) multiple OS's (or multiple computers) is going to be more of a reality for the telecommute, but still want to have fun set, which is a rapidly growing chunk of computer users.

Microstupid says you can't dual run 95/98 and NT on the same machine - file sytem and registry incompatibilities, etc.

With IDE, it's impractical, since it's a pain to dual boot different drives (as opposed to different partitions on the IDE primary/master drive) You can run different partitions, but have to be a little more careful about not messing up drive letters, etc. With SCSI, it is dirt easy, since from the SCSI BIOS you can quickly drop drives without physically disconnecting them, and you can designate any drive as bootable.
Since different OS's require different installations of the same app, it's easier to simply have one drive set up for NT and one for 95/98. I then put all data and non-OS specific stuff on a third, and games and experimental stuff on the fourth. Throw in the CD burner, DVD, Zip and Jaz drives, scanners, and I've still got room to spare on my SCSI bus.
endProc

I'm not raggin on you personally, I know it is more expensive, but it is worth it in terms of performance, and it's not as much more expensive as you think, especially if you go just to SCSI 2, where you can get the controller (with the 7 device limit, not 15) for about 75 bucks, instead of the higher cost for the SCSI 3 or Ultra2Wide (should be SCSI 4, but they came up with a stupid name.)

posted 06-02-99 03:52 PM ET            

Love my Pentium III and current setup for my machine. I have YET to find something to slow it down, other than basic sucky IO (reading/writing huge files to the Zip, or dropping lots of small items to write to the CD-RW). It cranks along well. But then, my Pentium 120 before it did well on most things. Good setup of Ram and cache on a quick HD would let me compile 250,000 line Windoze apps in just a couple of minutes (with decent header caches) on the 120. [6 minutes from cold code (no caches)] That's a far journey from waiting 30 to 45 minutes to compile a simple 12,000 lines of code way back in windows 3.1 days. My P3 seems to take longer DISPLAYING the results of the compilations than it does to COMPILE the blooming thing. No wonder MS VC++ 6.O has INTERACTIVE debug-compilations. Is there EVER any reason to use VB again? You can almost rapid prototype (as "they" call it) no in VC. Who would have thought it? And on a PC!

I got the Zip after using the internal Zip 100's my workstations have. Much easier to throw a 30 to 50 meg file on a zip disk than span the darned thing. But as an external, it sucks. Get about the same to worse access speed as on the Ricoh... considering the Ricoh's write speed is 2x/4x (Does that make it a 3x? ) its SLOW writing. Reading is like all CD-Roms... yadda yadda yadda. Love my CD-RW though, especially with CD-RW disks being way cheaper than zip 100 disks, let alone 250 disks. My mother is a professional graphic artist and her and her peers are just now getting out of the Sysjets (? something jets...) in this region.

Love that CD burner though... Cut a copy of my Developer tools on Rewrites, and if they walk from scum playing army, I'm only out a $3 a disk. Go cut another copy and I'm back in business... YEAH!

I can't wait for the DVDs to settle down on standards for Rewritable though. One day maybe... That was why I went CD-Burner. I can always cut a CD-Rom to read wherever.

And I am wondering when all major games and developer kits are on DVD only... This 8 to 20 CD-Rom games would benefit for sure...

Usenet might collapse though... under that load of people posting movies off their DVD. Not that it would be a bad thing, but a couple of newsgroups are about the only place you can find support for the older software tools and the odd/unusual game.

posted 06-02-99 04:18 PM ET            

It's all a matter of what people want and what they are comfortable with. I'm just speaking in terms of the superiority of the technology, but IDE is becoming cheaper precisely because it IS a mass market item.
If SCSI sold more, it would be cheaper, like everything else in the hardware market.

But when people really start buying Pentium III's and that's the de facto standard machine, IDE on that platform will be a waste of the capability of the faster, more expensive processors. and the IDE technology has been extended as far as it can go.

posted 06-02-99 05:29 PM ET            

I don't have much time but I'll correct a few errors you made in your post

#1 You can have up to 8 IDE devices (4 controllers).

#2 SCSI drivers is as much of a mess as IDE ditto, did you ever try adding a HP TI4 Tape drive to an NT system ? EEEKKKK the MS certified driver that NT is born with suddenly malfunctions with SCSI timeouts �n masse.
Not to mention the dreaded BSODs that often happens with NT installs and newer Adaptec controllers. (yep there's a workaround but it's ANNOYING) Ironically IDE is no problem for NT.

#3 You have to set the SCSI IDjumper, IDE master/slave & SCSI ID...same deal if you ask me.

#4 Prices...see Klugs post.

#5 You need to check up on the latest benchmarks, SCSI is drives isn't that much faster than IDE anymore. Faster yes but only marginally.

#6 IDE is 100% backward compatible thus forcing some limitations upon the newer standard (ATA33&66), UW-SCSI2 or whatever it's called is nice but try reusing that
narrow SCSI CD drive you have lying around...finding the correct adaptor that will let you run it om the new bus is a mess. IDE no prob just plug it in.

#7 Multiple OS's is not a problem with IDE.
Any decent boot manager will let you do it.
Actually all you need to run dual boot Win & NT on 2 IDE drives is to put the NT boot partition on the primary disk and the data partition on the secondary. Now running W95 on the secondary without a 3rd party boot manager is hmmmm tricky but can be done if you have a BIOS that allows secondary drive boots as mine does

I don't dispute that SCSI is superior to IDE especially in server systems where IDE is a NO NO but then again Fibre channel will blow SCSI away in those systems.
For the average PC user SCSI simply isn't worth it and the extra buck is better spent on larger drives/more Ram/better gfx card/you name it.

The hunter has become the hunted

posted 06-02-99 05:33 PM ET            

nah you can't have that much money

posted 06-02-99 09:02 PM ET            

DS - I'll pick up your open architecture opponent engine idea, and use it to start that thread when I reemerge to get a glimpse of daylight.

And Dev - I *will* have that kind of money when I push these friggin jobs out the door late next week <evil grin> so the hunted will have fangs and claws. Won't flame you though, you do raise some good points, but you must be gently educated in the NT darkside.

posted 06-03-99 11:11 AM ET            

Teach me oh dark master.

That Luke Skywalker geek is a weak gimp anyway