On Thu, 25 Sep 2003 19:25:12 +0000
stevejohnson46@comcast.net wrote:

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>  First of all, I would like to thank everyone for their response to my=20
>  earlier  email.
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>  I am planning to go for desktop with the below components.
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>  Can someone share their experience (good or bad) bringing up NetBSD
>  and X-Server on a  desktop built with the specified parts ?
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>  1. Asus P4c800 Deluxe Intenl875 800Mhz DDR SATA ATA150 RAID Gigabit=20
>     LAN USB2.0 ATX.
>  2. Intel P4 2.4 Ghz 512k PGA 478pin  800Mhz FSB Retail Box.
>  3. PC3200 DDR 400 256 MB.
>  4. Maxtor 120 GB 7200 RPM ATA 133
>  5. PowerColor =96 ATI RADEON 9200 128MB DDR 8X AGP DVI+CRT+TV =96 (I am=
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>     planning to have dual boot environment and might be able to use this
>     for some windows applications as well).
>=20

re 1., the gigibit ethernet should work using the sk driver in -current,
but not in 1.6.1. Also, FYI I've got a system with the 875 intel chipset and
found that hyperthreading started working with mpacpi as of about a month
ago in-current.

re 3., I assume you mean 2 x 256MB. AFAIK the 875 chipset likes to drive
memory in pairs.

re. 4, I don't know if noise is a factor, but if so, I'm partial to seagate
barracudas when I build low noise systems, but perhaps newer maxtor drives=
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are quiet too. If matters to you, check the spec sheets. Baracuda IV and V
drives are all < 30DbA at idle.

re. 5, the radeon 9200 is not supported by XFree86 4.3.0, but is supported
in the the current development snapshots of XFree86. With the last stable
release of XFree86, you may be able to force the radeon driver to pretend
that the video card is an earlier supported model. If worse comes to worse,
the vesa driver should still be useable for any non-video based
applications.=20

So, if you plan to run netbsd-current, it should be fine, except for video.
If you plan to run 1.6.1, I'd rethink my choice of motherboard. Obviously,
things change pretty fast these days, plus there are too many things to keep
track of, so I could be "just plain wrong" on every count.=20


--=20
Harry Waddell
Caravan Electronic Publishing
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