Lance,

Who ever told you that MMX and EIDE are incompatable should
be looked at with a jundice eye, as you noted.  This is untrue.

For the dollars invested you will see little improvement going up
from P150 to P200...  and since you have a good budget, I would
consider moving on to PII technology.    You can get a good
mid-level Pentium2 motherboad & a PII-233MMX chip for around
$500, (wholesale here in the USA).   This will give you AGP
support for your graphics card...  and there are a great many
AGP video cards available, they are the fastest thing available.
Be sure you get the 440LX AGP chipset on your motherboard.

You can get an STB velocity128 AGP 4mg video card for under
$130.  These are considered one of the fastest cards available...
for AGP.   I use the STB Velocity128 PCI card and it is great.

Sorry, I cannot help you with pricing in Japan.  These are ballpark
prices I see here in the US.  A good place to check current pricing
is on Pricewatch:   http://www.pricewatch.com     so you have an
idea about the going rates.

My opinion you understand...

   Bob Wright


At 10:35 PM 2/17/98 +0900, you wrote:
>Dear Listonians:
>
>Lance has a P5-120 from Gateway, circa mid-1995.  He's pumped
>the RAM up to 48 megs, and he's added a BusLogic 958, a
>Seagate Barracuda, and an Archive PYTHON DAT drive.
>
>But Lance has discovered computer graphics.  I mean he's
>*really* discovered them -- big time.  Now, realizes he needs raw
>processing speed, and a motherboard that can cache more than the
>measly 64 megs his Aladdin can handle.  :(
>
>Lance is torn between the MMX OverDrive Processor, which
>seems like a nice price, but would only take him up to 180mhz.,
>and a new mb, with its unknown intricacies of size and
>compatibility issues.  (He doesn't really know which boards will
>fit in his full tower, and which won't.)  Advice he has gotten here
>in Japan has been spotty:  "You can't use EIDE with MMX."  :(
>(Really!  They said that!)
>
>Lance has a grand, plus.  Probably not enough to get a new
>box, but hopefully enough to refurbish the one he has and give
>it a few more years of life.  He knows he needs a new video
>card, too, because his ATI Mach64 (2 megs) ain't cuttin' it anymore.
>
>Please help Lance.  He needs to understand the issues, and the
>options.  He wants to avoid buying a fast board and a hot chip,
>for example, and then finding out his bus speed is a bottleneck
>that he can't get around.
>
>What should Lance do?
>
>Sincerely,
>
>Lance Cummings (who runs 4 OSes on his pathetic old box, and is
>*not* a hardware person at all)  :(
>
>
>          PCBUILD:  http://nospin.com  or  [log in to unmask]
>
>
>


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