On Tue, 2 May 2000, Federico Sevilla III wrote:
..
> personally, if you'd prefer) know about how Linux is doing with it? Have
> you gotten X up and running? Up to what color depth and resolution? Have
> you gotten your sound working? Is the system stable?
The i810/i810e has an i752 video card. This is supported by XFree86 3.3.6
and 4.0 (dunno about earlier). It's very similar to an i740 (it's somewhat
castrated, which is saying a lot because the i740 is crappy in itself as
it ONLY supports DME texturing).
That said, the 2D is decent. However a friend with an i740 (and take note,
the i740 is a BETTER video chipset) said that XFree86 is slow on the i740,
Accelerated/X is faster. But the 2D performance isn't staggering. It'd
suggest to stick with 16 bit color depth to help the speed.
..
> Also, I quote one of Orly's helpful replies:
>
> >Ahh, yes. That's an Intel i810 main board (one of the crappiest main
> >boards in existence, I hope you don't mind my saying).
>
> I presume that Orly can say this because our resident hardware expert
> (hehehe) has already had experience with this crappy board. I'm in need of
No experience, thank you. I'm no hardware "expert" but the combination of
reading a lot of web pages and an electrical engineering background helps.
:)
I only know this from Tom's Hardware. Also you might want to fetch the
i752 data sheet from Intel's web site (it's a PDF file).
> a cheap board, and my supplier recommended the Tomato T810B-S, which also
> has an integrated soundcard (an AC97 2.1 Compliant Code with 3D Stereo
> Enhancement, the website calls it). I was hoping Orly (and some other
> people who have had experiences with the T810B-S and/or the i810 chipset)
I am not sure, but I think the sound card on the i810e uses the AMR slot
(that's the audio modem riser). As such, it's a software-assisted sound
card (I'd avoid it like the plague, but right now me and my Vortex2 with
an optical digital out can't hear any sound because of some IRQ sharing
deficiencies in the 2.2.x kernel.. sigh).
"3d stereo enhancement" is NOT positional 3d as implemented by Aureal.
Basically they have some signal-processing hardware or software that
phase-shifts and delays one channel by 10ms or so. This simulates having
the speakers farther apart than they really are, adding "depth" to the
sound.
"3d stereo enhancement" can be done in software. Try the "stereo
enhancement" effects plugin in XMMS.
..
> could help me out because I need a cheap box, but I need a cheap box with
> Linux up and running with a decent X setup and sound. Perhaps you can
> recommend a better board within the same price range? Or perhaps you could
> let me know at least what works and what doesn't as far as this crappy
> board is concerned?
That's about as cheap a board as you can get, and it can run at 133MHz
FSB. The cheapest Via 694X boards are in the 3500 range. Dont get me
started about i820 boards :) AND i810/i810e supports UDMA66. I have no
idea if Linux supports it though.
The only problem is the lack of an AGP slot, but as I mentioned earlier
the Voodoo4 will have a PCI version (if you're into that..)
If you're willing to stick with a dead-end solution (e.g. no future
upgrades, but a decent Linux box for now) a K6-2 is a better solution. A
400MHz K6-2 can overclock cleanly to 500MHz, and the main boards are cheap
(the J530BF with 512K of cache is only 2200 or so, plus 2200 for the K6-2
itself..)
There also are expensive S7 boards such as the MSI 5184 and EpoX G2 (both
with 1MB of L2 cache). But if you stick with the "HIS" or "Jetway" boards
you can come in on the cheap.
Although.. if I were you.. I'd cough up the extra 3000 or so to get an
ABIT BP6 main board. DUAL celeron sockets, for SMP Linux goodness when you
can afford another processor. With a PowerLeap adapter, you can plug in a
CuMine PIII in there too. It's got very good overclocking from the BIOS
(as ABIT is famous for) and an HPT366 UDMA66 controller which IS supported
on Linux.
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