[olug] What to buy

[Phil Brutsche]

David Walker wrote:
> Can anyone recommend a good place to read up on what memory and bus speed will 
> really mean?

http://tomshardware.com
http://anandtech.com

> I am considering the purchase of a P4, and Abit IT7 (unless I find something 
> better), and a gig of ram.  

That gig 'o ram will cost nearly as much as the rest of the system! (ie 
$140 a stick at current pricing for quality RAM)

> Any experiences using the Abit IT7 with Linux?

 From looking at the Abit web page I'll tell you right now the RAID 
ports will be nearly worthless - the HighPoint and Promise "RAID" 
controllers are effectively Windows-only and have very poor performance 
compared to a 3ware ATA RAID card.  They work fine (or rather, the 
Promise cards do) as a JBOD, though.

Everything else should be pretty well supported.

> How much should I think about ram speed?  

Very much :)

> Is ram speed related to bus speed?

Which bus?  There are 3 or 4 on that board.

> Is a 400mhz or 533mhz bus worthwhile?

The 533MHz bus is ultimately more worthwhile, but the memory bus speed 
is closely tied to the CPU clock speed - in other words, how fast your 
memory goes will depend on which CPU you use.


Phil


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