From: rich@Rice.edu (& Murphey)
Subject: Re: [386BSD] Advice on System Wanted
Reply-To: Rich@rice.edu
Organization: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice
	University
Distribution: na
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 1993 05:49:23 GMT

>>>>> In article <1993Jan10.004142.17478@cc.gatech.edu>, gregh@cc.gatech.edu (Greg Hankins) writes:

Greg> I am in the process of putting together a 386 system to run 386BSD on.
Greg> (by 386BSD I mean the Jolitz port, not BSDi)
Greg> I have some basic questions about what kind of things are supported,
Greg> if you people on the net could help me out I would be very gratefull!
Greg> (I read Eric's guide, and didn't find [all] the answers - if there something
Greg> that does have these answers, please direct me to it)

The questions I can help you on are:

Greg> What kind of video card should I get, and what kind of chipset is the best
Greg> to get for 386BSD?  I know that I want SVGA, since I want to run X.

  For under $100, the Tseng ET4000 is reasonable.  For $200 or so
  an Actix Graphics Engine gives six times the performance of the
  ET4000.  Here are the rankings by xstones:
  
  model                 chip            xstones price   ratio
  GraphicEngine VLbus   S3 805          84K     $290    3.4 $/k
  GraphicEngine 32b     S3 801          64.1K   $210    3.3 $/k
  F1280 (most recent)   S3 924          48.6k   $210    4.3 $/k
  GraphicEngine 70      S3 911          37.4K   ?       ?  $/k
  F1280 (first model)   S3 911          24.6k   $170    6.9 $/k
  ATI VGA Wondercard XL ATI             ?       $130    ? $/k
  ET4000 32bit VLBus    ET4000          19.0k   $159    8.4 $/k
  ProDesigner II        ET4000          11.6k   $130    11.2 $/k
  Tseng                 ET4000          11.6k   $88     7.6 $/k
  Trident 8900C         TVGA8900        5.1k    $58     11.4 $/k


  911, 924 and 928 chips VRAM while the 801 and 805 use DRAM.  VRAM
  performance degrates less at high dot clock refresh rate and screen
  sizes.  Although the 80x performance is higher it may not necesarily
  scale as well as the 9xx to large displays.

  The following performance ratings are relative to a value of 10000
  for a monochrome SUN 3/50 running X11R3 communicating via unix
  sockets.  A machine with double the performance will therefore get
  20000 and a machine with half the performance will get 5000.  These
  benchmarks were taken on various PC hardware, so the results cannot
  be quantitatively consistent.  We should not rely on them
  quantitatively, but untill we have all the cards available in one
  place this will be the best we can do.

  machine              p  comm   line  fill   blt   text    arc   cmplx xstone
  Sparc2 gx            8 local  244821 44250 50912 435875 7763207 85816  97803
  Gr.Eng.32b 13MHz bus 8 local  107908 42632 31590 117562 2975512 92352  64061
  Gr.Eng.32b 6MHz bus  8 local  102774 45363 27382 113125 2485082 97712  60897
  F1280 924  486/33    8 local  111640 30450 21935 103812 2871708 62222  48559
  Gr.Eng.70 13MHz bus  8 local  103781 21777 16997  83875 2580416 46797  37496
  X11R5 S3 X386        8 local  107087 22917 15007  56375 2522818 44117  34032
  Sparc1+ cg3          8 local  121149 13219 10735 134750 2112958 22418  25901
  F1280 911            8 local   56746 16390 10463  53625 1425872 34444  24625
  ET4000 486/50 VLBus  8 local  123308 13529  5951 138187 1941774 18954  19008
  ET4000 486/33        8 socket  88671  9562  3372  97281 1377355 11307  11621
  Sun3/50 (R3)         1 socket  10000 10000 10000  10000   10000 10000  10000
  Trident 8900C        8 socket  55957  2503  1990  45937  705011  4248   5123

  line = solid-line, dashed-line, wide-line and rectangle performance.
  fill = solid-, tile- and stipple-rectangle-fill performance.
  blt = invrects, screencopy, scroll, and bitmapcopy performance.
  arc = arc- and filledarc performance.
  p = color/greyscale planes. '1' means monochrome.

  Actix's GraphicEngine 23b $210 Palo Alto Micro 415-493-8209
  Orchid Fahrenheit 1280 1Mb+Sierra $210 OS Computer 800-938-6722
  ATI VGA Wondercard XL 1Mb $129 Harmony Computer 800-441-1144
  Orchid ProDesigner IIs 1Mb+Sierra $130 Dee One Systems 800-831-8808
  Tseng ET4000 1Mb $88 OS Computer 800-938-6722
  TVGA8900 Trident 8900C 1MB $58 Dee One Systems 800-831-8808
  ET4000 32bit VLBus 1Mb  $159 PC Importers 800-886-5155
  S3-C805 1MB DRAM $169 Xxera Technology 818-286-5569

  NB: XFree86 does not yet support the Trident 9000 or any Diamond
  card designed after the Diamond Speedstar+.

Greg> Can I run X comfortably with 8MB of RAM (one or two xterms - no heavy compiling)?

Yes you can run X alone in 8Mb with no problem.  You need only about
2.5Mb of memory for xinit, X386, xterm, emacs and gwm.  The latter are
memory hogs, so 2.5Mb is conservative estimate of the minimum memory
used by X itself on 386BSD.  With 8mb you won't have much room to run
more daemons, etc. though.  Rich
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd