On 17 Mar 99, at 7:53, Donna Doty wrote:

> I have a dinosaur(Presario 2240) and want to gradually (very) upgrade, I
> received an add for this Tyan board.  I would be moving 256 cache, 2.1 G
> hd, 56k modem, floppy, 49 m ram, does this sound like a good deal?  I also
> have the same company offering
>
> AMD K6-III 400 with 3DNow! with 256KB L2 Cache ......$349.99 -

> ....  I would be moving 256 cache, ...

  Cache generally doesn't move well from one board to another.

  In this case, the Tyan S1590S board includes 1 MB of cache already
soldered onto the motherboard.  There are no sockets to allow the
addition of your older cache chips.

  Like the PPro and PII, the K6-III incorporates L2 cache into the CPU;
unlike the Intel chips, the AMD chip will fit in Socket 7, and will use
existing motherboard cache memory as "L3" cache.

  [That $349.99 *may* just be for the CPU chip -- your message implies
that you think it includes the motherboard.  I'd double-check that with
the vendor!  You may find the K6-II, at about $150, to be a more
affordable alternative that will still show a comfortable boost over
your current configuration.]

> ..., 49 m ram, ...

  49 MB is a very odd size for RAM.  [You may perhaps mean 48MB;
48*1024*1000 = 49,152,000, but 48M is actually48*1024*1024 =
50,331,648....]

> I use Illustrator, Photoshop, alot of graphics based programs....

  Photoshop, especially, can benefit from having lots of physical RAM
installed.  I'd go for at least a 128MB SDRAM DIMM, and be prepared for
the possibility that your existing RAM may not be usable (or, if
usable, may not actually be useful) in the Tyan board.

  See

http://www.funsreview.com/tyan100.htm

for a review of this board.

David G

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