Re: PC Purchase: Recommendations?

[Matt Ion <mion -at- DIRECT -dot- CA>]

On Mon, 31 Jul 1995 00:05:20 -0400 you wrote:

>SCSI may be the way to go--that's what I have in fact--but you will also
>find that compatible upgrades in hardware (hard drives, etc.) are also
>more expensive so do plan for it if you go that way.

They really aren't THAT much more expensive, and if you're outfitting a
high-end, high-productivity machine, the added performance should more than
make up for the added cost.

Besides, think about your precious bus-slot real-estate.  I can put, as an
example, a tape drive, three or four hard drives, a CD-ROM (or two), and a
scanner all on one SCSI adapter.  Doing so without SCSI would require at least
an EIDE controller for more than two HDs, proprietary controller(s) for the
CD-ROM(s) - with the possiblility of hardware conflicts with the >2 IDE drives
if they're IDE-type CD-ROMs, another custom interface for any kind of
performance out of a tape drive (let's face it, QIC-40/80 is NOT something you
want to saddle a high-performance machine with, without the drive at least
having its own buffering controller), and a custom interface or second
parallel interface for the scanner.  You're looking at eating up anywhere from
three to six bus slots to handle the same amount of equipment as a single SCSI
adapter.

If you have a VLB machine and want VLB performance all around in this case,
you're SOL, as the most VESA expansion slots I've seen in one machine was four
(and I've only seen that once - most only have two or three), and since you
ARE concerned with performance here, you already have a VESA video card eating
up one of those.  PCI is even worse, because many of these devices don't come
with equivalent PCI adapters, or if they do, they're so expensive you
shouldn't be worrying about the minimal additional cost of SCSI.

In short, if you're putting together a high-performance, high-productivity
workstation an NOT starting with SCSI right off, you might as well just use a
Trident TVGA8900 video card as well.



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