From: keiths@cae.wisc.edu (Keith Scidmore)
Subject: Re: Availability and RAM Question
Organization: College of Engineering, Univ. of Wisconsin--Madison
Date: 30 Dec 92 10:23:35 CST

In article <3l227df@rpi.edu> strider@clotho.acm.rpi.edu (Greg Moore) writes:
>
>	A couple of questions and comments.
>First: what is the current time delay between ordering a system
>and the shipping date?  And please, I'd like a realistic answer,
>not the standard "Oh, 2 weeks, no problem."  If it is going to 
>take over a month, fine, as long as I know in advance.

I got mine 2 days late.  It took 5 days rather than three and was
ordered a week prior to Xmas.  It pissed me off because the saleman
insisted that it would go out that day.  No biggy, I just hate being
lied.  

>	What is the current vide card that is ACTUALLY shipping?
>I know for a while you folks were advertising one, but needing to
>ship another due to availability problems.  Is the loca bus video
>card shipping and is it in fact any faster than the Diamond 24X?
>If not, can I order the 24X instead?
>

I'll leave this to Jim Erickson.  I can tell you that I was shipped
the 24X card.  Diamond rewrote the WD drivers on this card to get the
extra speed they wanted.  I've had some problems (all non-fatal) and
some of the mags have made comments about flicker, and odd Windows
behavior.  I run OS/2 2.0 and do notice the flicker and have had color
changes occur during task switching.  Switching tasks again fixes the
problem.

>	Any clue (since I've not heard elsewhere) when/if the 
>P24T chip will ship for upgrading?

Intel is saying possibly 1994 to as late as 1995. It depends on who 
you talk to.  The p24T, btw, isn't the same chip as the p5.  It
will be more like a Pentium technology overdrive chip.

>	Finally, I'm thinking of ordering a machine with 8 Meg
>of RAM (instead of the 16 Meg package).  However, I want to be able
>upgrade the machine to the full amount someday (64 Meg I believe).
>Will I be able to do this without throwing out the original 8 Meg
>of RAM?

You may want to throw out the memory anyway.  The Zeos manual
says the memory system is desiged to perform optimally with 50ns
rams.  Jim, please correct me on this if I'm wrong, but the
memory is designed to work in paged-mode and is not interleaved.  The
tests I've done show it to be quite fast if you lie to the bios
and tell it you have 60ns rams rather than the 70ns rams that come with.
Still, at some future date you may want to put in 50ns rams.  My tests
were without a L2 cache and with the L1 cache diabled.

Zeos is not the only company to run into availability problems with
50ns rams.  It is part of the risk you take if you want cutting-edge 
systems with features like the P24T upgrade socket.  There are only
3 places you can buy P24T boards.  Zeos is the only one of these that
also has VLB, I believe.

HEY YOU AT ZEOS, IT SURE WOULD BE NICE IF YOU CACHES WOULD CACHE
WRITES AND READS!  A NICE WRITE-BACK CACHE WITH ONE CYCLE ACCESS
TIME WOULD MAKE THESE MODULES WORTH PUTTING IN THE MACHINES YOU
SEND IN FOR REVIEWS. A WRITE-THROUGH CACHE ONLY DOES PART OF THE
JOB.  
 
>	The machine I'm looking to order is the Package #3:
>486DX2-66 with 8 Meg of RAM, 200+ Meg hard drive, dual floppies,
>in a vertical case and with either the 128K or 256K RAM cache.

I was told that the 256K ram cache is Vaporware.  I ordered one
and the salesman failed to tell me that these modules don't
even exist yet (per a Zeos person I contacted).  I don't know
if this is true for the 128K cache too.  Nonetheless, I can
live without a cache for a while.  Its better to wait than to
end up with one that was rushed out the door and has problems.

I benchmarked the Seagate 245MB drive against the Fujitsu 510 IDE
which HDI said was faster and found that the Seagate is 10%-15%
faster.  I don't think you can buy a drive in that price range
that will deliver better performance.  This drive screams!  A word
of caution, some manufacturers like Quantum and WD are putting some
pretty nice caches on their drives.  The result is that when the 
mags test them they look very fast.  If you run a large software
cache on top of the disks small cache all the small cache will
see is LRU blocks from the software cache.  This means that the
sofware cache strips away some of the caching benefits of the
drive.  Look-ahead buffering is a different matter.

I think the Package #3 drive is quite a bit faster than the 330
MB WD I think is sold with package 4.  It spins faster and has
a lower quoted seek.  I have not actually tested one, however.

Keith R. Scidmore
Newsgroups: biz.zeos.general