"lukem" == Luke Mewburn <lm@cpr.itg.telecom.com.au>
lukem>> I've seen a nicely manufactured [&] 486 that has 4 PCI, 1 VLB, 3 ISA
lukem>> with Intel chipset.

"mycroft" == Charles M. Hannum <mycroft@gnu.ai.mit.edu>
mycroft> This sounds like the ASUS/AUStek PCI/I-486 SP3G.  I've been hearing a
mycroft> lot of good things about these boards, though I haven't used one
mycroft> myself.

>From what I remember of seeing a friend's machine boot, it has award bios
and ASUS was displayed somewhere in the boot mesg. too...


lukem>> I currently have
lukem>> an AHA 1542CF which I know is the bottleneck (my DEC RZ26 disk
lukem>> is definately faster than the 1400K/s I currently get)

mycroft> Or the file system parameters are abysmal.

Tuned to -d 0 -n 1 -a 32. (I've been doing -a 32 since before the
discussion on the list; hangover from f/s performance tuning under
Ultrix) From testing (using bonnie), and seeing the results from a
similar drive using a Buslogic VLB 445S, I'm maxing out on the ISA.


lukem>>  PS: Cost is AU$215 for M/B, and AU$110 for card, [...]

mycroft> Does that include the CPU and/or memory?

Nope. Just a pure board. Typical costs (in Australian Dollars) for
stuff is like:
    i486dx2-66 chip:		250-300
    486 VLB no CPU board:	125
    486 PCI no CPU board:	215-260
    Pentium 90 cpu/PCI board	600-800
    4MB 9bit SIMM		180
    4MB 72pin SIMM		215
    #9 GX 64 Pro (S3-964) video	800	
    #9 GX 64 (S3-864) video	350
    Quantum LPS 540MB SCSI-2 	450

The dx2-66 chip is cheapest bang for buck. AMD dx2-80 cpus (which I
have been waiting for for a while) are about $500, so for the little
extra grunt and the limitations (VLB & PCI don't work (well) > 33MHz),
it's not worth upgrading...

(sidenote: the gov. reduces import tariffs and we still pay too much...)

-- 
Luke Mewburn                          UNIX Technical Support
<lm@cpr.itg.telecom.com.au>              CPR Project, ITG
Phone: +61 3 634 2112                   Telecom Australia.