On Fri, 1 Dec 1995, Matthew B. Wood wrote:

> 1) dropping big bucks for new cards after the change...but not expecting 
> the core group to help with that.  :)

So buy the cheap ones. :-)

There's not really a lot you need to put on PCI. You definitely
want your video card on PCI, but the drivers seem to notice no
difference. I use a Mach32 with 2MB of VRAM, which cost me about
CDN$280 ten months ago. I expect that it would be perhaps US$150
these days, if that.

You also want your disk controller on PCI. I use the NCR SCSI chip
on my personal workstation (US$70 or so), but it's not perfectly
reliable. On systems that I would have to come in and reboot if
they failed at 3 a.m. I use the Buslogic SCSI card. (I've got one
PCI and one VLB.) They run reasonably fast and seem rock solid.
They're CDN$275, meaning perhaps US$200.

Fast ethernet should certainly go on PCI, if you've got it, but
for regular Ethernet I stick with the better ISA cards (SMC Elite
and 3Com 3C509).

cjs

Curt Sampson    curt@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
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