Felix Hernandez <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I'm in the process of building my first system and I'm inquiring some
> information
>
> 1. Purchasing a motherboard with a built in SCSI
>         a. Does it restrict you from only installing SCSI Hard Drives or
> can you also install an IDE Hard Drive?

You can still use either or both, in fact, most motherboards with built-in SCSI
also have the usual dual IDE controller as well. I have an IWILL P55TV
motherboard which has dual bus master EIDE interfaces (VX based) plus Adaptec
2940U SCSI.

The Award BIOS has several options for booting, including SCSI first, CDROM, and
various drive letters (C, D, E. etc). Booting from a CDROM works for EIDE CDROM
if the boot order has CDROM first. For SCSI it is different, because the Adaptec
BIOS will recognize a bootable CD in the drive, and assign the bootable CDROM to
"A:". If the boot order is set to "A" first, then it boots off the CD. And yes,
I have tried making my own bootable CD and it works. See
http://nikko.simplenet.com/goldentime/bootcd.htm for information on making a
bootable CD.

>         b. Dual processors, what is the purpose of having dual     processors
> and will it increase the performace of a system            (running graphics
> applications like games)?

When using an OS that can take advatnage of multiple processors, then the work
load can be distributed among the two processors. Just how well it can
distribute the processing depends on the applications to some degree (an
application not written for multi-threading may not be able to take advantage of
it, however the OS can still run other processes on the other CPU's.)

A couple OS's that can take advangatge of multplie CPU's are Windows NT and
Solaris x86. Windows 95 cannot take advantage (although it will run, but use
just a single CPU).

> 2. Purchasing a Network Card
>         a.  What information should I look for as far as the performance
> of the card?

Depends on what you want to do. If bandwidth is all important, then consider a
100mbit card (even 10/100 autosense cards are pretty cheap these days). Most
definitely get PCI. Some of the more expensive cards have onboard processors
and/or DMA channels to offload the CPU.

>         b. Is the performance of the Network Card as important as the
> performance of the system

If you use it to occassionaly transfer files, then no. If the machine is a
server that is serving a lot of other machines for network or file services,
then it is definitely a very important part of the system, and its performance
will have a wide ranging impact.


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Russ Poffenberger               Engineering Specialist
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