>>I have the Supermicro Dual Pentium Pro (DNF) motherboard
>>that you mentioned.  It's working great!  I did not install

>We also have 3 SNFs (same as DNF but with no support circuitry for the
>2nd CPU) with 128MB and 2940UWs hooked to striped dual Seagate 15150Ws
>(4.3GB per). One motherboard is still in the box, but the other two have
>been running NetBSD in a production environment for about a month with
>no problems. They are definitely much faster than P5-166s (an example
>compile went from 908 seconds down to under 500 seconds).

Someone on a FreeBSD list claimed a FreeBSD kernel build time of 214
seconds on a 200MHz P6.  That would be truly amazing. :-)  Wonder what
CGD gets on those high-end Alphas...

>As with another respondent, we've noticed that memory write times are
>actually *slower* than a P5-166, while read times are twice as fast.

Have you tried to play with the BIOS, or one of those DOS utilities,
to turn on posted writes (if they're not on already)?

Also, could the pipelined, delayed write, multi-ported cache of the P6
maybe be messing up the benchmark you're using?  Maybe it's seeing
bogus data (like maybe longer latencies make it look like it's slower,
but the thru-put is actually faster in a way it doesn't measure)?
Just speculating...

>>You may want to buy the DNE model of the motherboard; it's
>>newer and it's a BABY size.  DNF is a FULL size motherboard
>>.  The only advantage for DNF is that you can fit any full
>>length add-on card to it without any problem.

>Wish I'd known about the DNE when we got our SNFs. It's a real pain
>finding cabinets they can fit into. Does the DNE also have 8 RAM
>sockets? Same number of PCI slots (4)?

I believe the [DS]NE has six SIMM sockets, as opposed to eight on the
[DS]NF.  Don't remember about the slots.  Check out SuperMicro's
*very* stark but functional web site: http://www.SuperMicro.com/.

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  Michael L. VanLoon                                 michaelv@HeadCandy.com
        --<  Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x  >--
    NetBSD working ports: 386+PC, Mac 68k, Amiga, Atari 68k, HP300, Sun3,
        Sun4/4c/4m, DEC MIPS, DEC Alpha, PC532, VAX, MVME68k, arm32...
    NetBSD ports in progress: PICA, others...

   Roll your own Internet access -- Seattle People's Internet cooperative.
                  If you're in the Seattle area, ask me how.
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