Re: $200 PC

francisco wrote:
...
> i've been running 3.2-stable on one of these for a month now as my primary

Francisco (and a few other people) and I have had some off-list discussions...

It is probably worth pointing out a few things: 1) This machine DOES have a vr(4) network adapter. Miod just committed a patch to -current which helps this problem, however there may still be more issues. Probably NOT the best supported chip in our driver set.

*I* had no problems, but all that means is *I* had no problems in the fiddling I did, and unfortunately, having it in service here for six months of testing isn't an option at the moment... (and of little use if I did... "This machine you COULD have bought last year really works great. Too bad it was discontinued six months ago". I suspect no one is interested in a review of my Deskpro 6000 PII-266. 8-)

> on a performance note, the machine is just barely fast enough for mplayer

I did some performance testing on the thing against my IBM Netfinity PII-400 "fast build" machine. The Epic-800 compiled a little faster than the Netfinity -- but the Netfinity sorta compensates for its "slow" processor with a 10k RPM SCSI drive, whereas the SYSMAR401 had a rather pokey single platter 5400rpm drive

I did one test that shocked the heck out of me -- mp3 encoding was done almost twice as fast by my PII-400 than by the Via C3-800. This was explained to me by two people (who both said the same thing!): The Via C3's FPU sucks (relatively) compared to the Intel's. Figures that the only FPU intensive thing I ever do is the processor test I picked. 8-/

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So yes, this is probably NOT the ultimate multi-media machine.

Still...interesting box. Great price.

Nick.

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