On 9 Jun 99, at 9:39, Vincent Lim wrote:

> 1.    Should I get a Celeron or a AMD in the timeframe that I have
> allocated myself?  If so, which clock speed should I get to?

  I don't know of any really good SS7 motherboards in ATX, so I'd say that
if you want ATX (and I'd recommend it for a new machine) that AMD is out of
this picture.

> 2.    Which M/B chipset should I get?  There's so many variants, BX, LX,
> ZX, 370, 810, SIS, VIA?  What are the differences?  Which chipset will
> ensure longevity?

  SIS and VIA are non-Intel chipset makers, and would only be applicable if
you were going AMD.  810 is new, and apparently has trouble with PIII; LX is
old, and doesn't support 100MHz FSB.  I don't think ZX does, either.  BX has
been the main chipset for Slot 1 with 100 MHz FSB, and is nice and mature.

> 3.    Which M/B manafacturer should I get from and why?

  Abit BH6/BX6 seem to be preferred for overclocking, probably because of
their provision for tweaking the CPU voltage.  This is an area you've
expressed interest in.

> 4.    Am I buying too much SDRAM?  Which SDRAM should I buy?  What's the
> differences between 1st party, 3rd party RAM?  How should RAMBUS affect
> my buying decisions?

  RAMBUS is not quite "ready for prime time" yet.  SDRAM is fine.  128MB
should be pretty comfortable -- you can add more later if you get into stuff
that needs it.

> 5.    Which Graphics Card should I buy?  Do I have enough onboard RAM,
> too little or too much?  What are the reasons for for the graphic
> chipset?

  I like the Matrox "Millenium" cards, but on a budget the ATI Rage series
are quite a reasonable choice too.  If your 17" monitor is good, it may offer
resolutions that a 4MB card would have trouble supporting.

> 6.    Should I buy DMA-66 harddisk instead?  What's the actual
> performance differences?

  I haven't seen actual support for Mode 5 *or* DMA-66 yet; in both cases,
the drive should fall back to whatever the board does provide -- which will
still probably provide more throughput than the drive can sustain.


David G

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