First off, thank you to everybody who sent me answers or
suggestions.  I've got some very good leads now, and the decision for me
is getting easier all the time.  I thought I should clarify on my
thoughts of overclocking, however.  My primary thoughts weren't so much
with getting the CPU to run faster, but the higher (than 66MHz) bus
speeds that can be reached.  The ASUS motherboard I mentioned apparently
works quite well at 75 or even 83MHz.

Excerpts from mail: 5-Aug-97 Re: NetBSD/i386 processor r.. by M.
HeadCandy.com@MindBen 
> I seriously doubt you could get the chip to even boot at 250MHz.  20%
> is generally about the max a decent chip will tolerate, from many of
> the tests I've tried.  You might be able to get 233MHz out of it
> (assuming it knows how to interpret the pins for 233MHz, which were
> not available in any previous P5s, if I'm not mistaken -- i. e. it may
> be that only the 233MHz Pentium knows how to interpret an old speed
> selection as 233MHz, instead of some slower speed).

According to <A HREF="http://www.sysdoc.pair.com/overclock.html">Tom's
Overclocking Survey</A>, if you get the stats on 200MHz Pentiums, a
considerable number of people have successfully overclocked the MMX
version to 250.  The non-MMX version seems to fare much worse.  The
reason why I brought it up was that at the 250MHz speed on the ASUS
motherboard, the bus is running at 83MHz, and the PCI bus at 41.5MHz. 
Considering how much higher this is than 66/33MHz, I wasn't sure how
much of a difference that would make.  Though with a Pentium Classic it
looks like 250MHz speed is too high.  Though the next multiple down is
208MHz, which would likely be easier to do with a Pentium Classic and
would still have the benefit of the high bus speeds.  Also, the
P5-200MMX seems to be at about the price P5-200's were when I started
looking into this a few weeks ago...  =)

So would this make the P5 compare that much better to a P6, or is the P6
still the way to go?

Again, thank you for all the help so far.  I'm really looking forward to
upgrading my machine now...  =)

BTW, does anybody have any good suggestions on where to get a good (but
cheap...  =) SCSI card that NetBSD supports?  My current motherboard has
a built-in 53c810.  I used to see a lot of PCI cards based on this chip,
but haven't had any luck finding any recently.  Any suggestions?  I'd
like to stick to PCI and under $100 (and supported by NetBSD,
obviously..  =).  All my drives are narrow, so wide isn't required
(though I wouldn't complain).



                                                          Will Ferry

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