'90s era PC recommendation.

Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote: EISA is a nice-to-have, especially if you want to run multiple interfaces (much better irq handling than ISA) and/or higher speed stuff like FDDI, 100Mb enet, T-3/ATM, etc. Or you already have a cache of EISA cards. That said (and this is x86 specific, because there's a whole HPPA EISA world I don't know a lot about with all sorts of weird stuff): 1) PCI does a better job......usually. 2) EISA motherboards, desktop machines and fun/exotic network cards seem to be getting increasingly rare and ridiculously expensive, at least on evil auction sites. On the other hand, 10Mb EISA ethernet and scsi cards are chump change. 3) There are some interesting network things that just don't seem to have ever been made for EISA. For example, I've never heard of a fibre ethernet or HSSI card for EISA. 4) I think EISA limits you to 386 through PII CPUs (and probably PII as a PPro Overdrive upgrade outside of a server class machine). At least, I can't think of a P3 machine with EISA. YMMV. 5) The video card options are a bit thin on EISA. The Compaq QVision VGA is common as dirt (and just as dumb), but outside of that the ELSA Winner and ATI Mach32 are the only "real" graphics cards I seem to see often. There's probably some awful TIGA boards out there somewhere. Go PCI. I held on to a couple of Intel Xpress machines for the EISA bus. I doubt I'd pay the premium over a solid PCI/ISA machine. Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: Yeah, but didn't the GX (and KX) have some pretty serious bugs until really late steppings? Same to a lesser extent with the NX. The BX (and FX) however was very reliable, as I recall. Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote: Yeah, me too. Great chip with a long useful life. I ran a couple of Intel PR440FX based machine for years past their expiration date because they kept up with the load and just wouldn't die. ALR Revolution server, probably. NCR and Corollary made 8-ways. Great machine; built like a tank. Much better quality than the Xpress. I had an XL 6200 (200Mhz PPro) for many years and still regret getting rid of it. Lucky you you got yours back. The HP Vectra XU was also pretty nice.