On Wed, 2002-05-15 at 01:18, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: > How good are the integrated devices on these boards, compared to the ones you > can buy as add-in PCI cards?
Don't know yet, you've got me started on CPU utilization numbers. ;) I'll give you the bean spill when I get thru distilling this google page... Well, here's a bit I just found, regarding CPU utilization and IEEE 1394/USB 2.0: http://www.extremetech.com/article/0,3396,apn=7&s=1005&a=25038&app=5&ap=6,00.asp This test puts both buses under considerable stress as it is evaluating a portable hard drive capable of attaching to both buses. Therefore to the authors of the article it seemed an excellent opportunity for a bus to bus performance comparison. BTW, it may be just me, but that site seems slow. > Tom's reviews never seem to give them much > attention. How do they perform? Do they tax the CPU any more than a standalone > card would? I am interested in getting a board with integrated sound and > ethernet. I would like the board to have at least 4 IDE interfaces (not > channels) so I can give an entire interface to each of my devices. How well do > the features of these boards work in Linux? > > Based on these, can anyone make a board recommendation? I don't want to spend > too much money, and that is the reason why I'm going for integrated peripherals. > They need to be decent, though. In the link above, it's evident that USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394 are very very close in throughput; 1394 has the edge in CPU utilization at 11.6%. USB 2.0 rated at 15.4%. The authors of the article I'm looking at point out that drivers have a big impact on these numbers. I don't yet see a mention of the chipset that supports USB; I'm still looking for comparisons of that sort. With regard to IDE controllers, I can tell you that a HPT37X IDE controller is better than anything I've seen yet for IDE drives; including the Promise options. I've got my primary Raid 0 array on the integrated Highpoint controller. This frees up the vanilla IDE controller on the mainboard for such mundane stuff like CDrom or zip, or experimentation; keeping the Highpoint channels free and dedicated to soft Raid. Since you're board searching, check this out: http://www.enmic.de/www/produkte/boards/8ttx2+/8ttx2+.htm First board from a German company I've ever seen; impressive. In the Uncle Tom roundup OpenGL standings, here is where it stood: http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/02q2/020509/kt333-29.html Originally I was leaning towards the Epox, but the german Enmic board is touted by Pabst as being supremely stable; by comparison he said there were some crashes with the Epox 8k3a+. This is interesting since externally the Epox and the Enmic are virtually indistinguishable. The stability statement doesn't bother me much, (the Epox) I take that with a grain of salt, since he got a weeks worth of benches out of this board, after it went thru the standard burn in process. If he had gotten some real trouble he would have raised holy hell. Or I should say unholy hell. What does bother me is the same thing that might be attractive to you, namely the onboard sound. I'd rather not have onboard sound, I think it's evil; I've already got two sound cards here that are exceptional. However, since I love the Epox and the Enmic boards so much in this review, I'm considering getting one of those anyway and then disabling the onboard sound. I looked in the features section of the TH review (there for anybody who bothered to read the article) and found what chipset the onboard sound is using, so you can evaluate it for yourself: http://www.realtek.com.tw/htm/products/cp/alc650.asp If by chance you are interested in perusing the board features, here is the link to the Enmic: http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/02q2/020509/kt333-07.html HTH, Best Regards, L8r, LX :) -- ��������������������������������������������������� Kernel 2.4.8-26mdk Mandrake Linux 8.1 Enlightenment 0.16.5 Evolution 1.02 Registered Linux User #268899 http://counter.li.org/ ���������������������������������������������������
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