'90s era PC recommendation.

[Grant Taylor]

On 05/07/2018 08:52 PM, Ken Seefried 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):

Yep, that's what I'm thinking about doing.

I had a cache of EISA cards before a ~1000 mile move.  Now I'm looking 
at how much it might cost to reacquire a small portion of them and I'm 
weeping.

> 1) PCI does a better job......usually.

"usually"  LOL

> 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.

Yep.  Part of my cache was NICs and SCSI HBAs.

I also had some more exotic multi-port serial cards, with breakout 
cables / boxes.

> 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.

I want to say that I've seen EISA fiber Ethernet cards.  But I may be 
misremembering.

> 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.

I think that CPU range perfectly encompass the OSs that I'd want to run too.

> 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.

~chuckle~

I'm just after 2D, 256 color, 800x600, or maybe 1024x768.  I don't think 
that's asking too much of a graphics card.  Though I'm asking about it 
for a card later in that time frame.

> 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.

ACK



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die