CompuServe Messages

Stephen, basically, the first thing you need to establish is exactly how much money you want to spend. (I pound this point a lot!) One you have established that, pick up a copy of Amazing and start asking questions both here and of the mail order houses about the characteristics of the various options at that price point. Since you probably want to spend as little cash as possible, you'll probably want to look at one of the boards that plug into where your current CPU is located. They tend to bypass a lot of the bus logic problems that plague the daughterboard slot. One thing to pay particular attention to is that if you are serious about wanting acceleration is that the board absolutely MUST have onboard RAM. I don't care who makes it or where it goes, without its own RAM chips clocked at near the same speed as the CPU, you can forget any real speadup in your computer. Onboard cache is sweet, but it lasts only for the first loop, unless your program is by Khalid. It simply takes too long to get something from inside the normal machine memory to make any other kind of acceleration worthwhile. Essentially what you want to have is to do most of the processing in the CPU and memory on the board you install and minimize the amount of processing that takes place off of that board. You should turn the rest of your machine into a big I/O (Input/Output) processor, just as the "big guys" (mainframes) do. So look at how many applications you run at a time, how much memory they occupy, and that should determine exactly how much 32 bit memory you should buy. And then, add half again, since we ALL overload our machines <g>. Anything less, and you'll be dissappointed. I hope this helps. Brian Been there…. Done that…. Better.