CompuServe Messages

John: I intentionally left that last message short. I could have written a 10,000 character message on the issue. And I'm trying to avoid that now. The problem is that the facts are all rather low level. For example, we know that VGA boards use 64K memory mapped banks with I/O mapped control registers to get to the frame buffer. And we know that P9000 boards us direct memory mapped frame buffers. We also know that I/O operations on X86 processors are slow compared to memory operations. And we know that the graphics drivers for 3DS are written by independent developers, who have the choice of implementing them any way they like. These are all facts. Beyond this, it's all interpretation. A person who is not intimate with *all* the relavent facts might make an incorrect interpretation. The problem is that magazines such as PC present a limited set of facts, and relate their interpretations based on them. Readers, such as Marion, tend to go with these interpretations, even if they were intended to be only narrowly construed. Regarding the performance of a 386/40 versus a 486/33 as a network server – there are too many factors to make a flat statement. But, to generalize, the system will be I/O bound by the network (at 10 Mb/s) and the hard disk. Further, the ISA bus will be a factor. All things being the same, I'd *guess* that the higher raw clock rate of the 386/40 would be overcome by the improved pipelining of the 486/33, and both would be ovecome by the limited speed of the ISA bus. In the end, I suppose it wouldn't make much difference which you use. Of course, I could be wrong, and probably am. Evan