[2208] in Release_7.7_team
GX110 looks good.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed Apr 12 17:59:02 2000
Message-ID: <ksxD6PsGgE6e01TNw0@mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 17:58:51 -0400 (EDT)
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: owls@MIT.EDU
CC: release-team@MIT.EDU
Greg and Thomas have successfully installed Athena on the GX110 system
purchased for test. Although sound is not yet working, Thomas is
confident that it can be made to work very soon.
I spoke with the Andy Meyer, our Dell salesman, and souped up the
configuration based on our conversations this past Monday at Owls.
Note: The prices on www.dell.com/hied are, until the end of April more
deeply discounted than usual. Andy said that the prices we see on the
web right now are the same as what he would give us for the renewal
after the end of April. (Apparently everybody gets the quantity
discount he would have offered us.)
http://web.mit.edu/wdc/www/linuxconfig.html has the old GX1 config, and
the configuration I propose we buy.
Differences:
256M of memory instead of 128M of memory.
ECC is not available on the GX110.
Drive speed is 5400 RPM instead of 7200 RPM
CPU is 600MHz instead of 550MHz
Cache is 256K full spead instead of 512K half speed.
Video is on an NVIDIA TNT2 card instead of the ATI Rage Pro
that was on the motherboard of the GX1
Tradeoffs:
I propose 2 DIMMs of 128M each. Although this fills all the memory
slots, getting it all on one DIMM is $53 more.
I propose going to the 600 MHz processor. This processor costs $43 more
than the 533MHz processor. The next faster CPU, 667 MHz costs an
additional $106. My rationale here is that the 600 MHz CPU upgrade
comes at a very small incremental cost compared to other steps up in CPU
performance, and it will probably be valued by users. (And we're still
under $1700!)
Questions:
Should we spend $53 more for the ability to drop more ram into machines
in the field without throwing away 128M chips to do so? This decision
hinges on how likely we think it will be that we upgrade memory in the
field. These systems have 3 year lifespans, and we've not tended to
upgrade memory until year four of very old system.s
What display resolution should we set by default?
The new boxes support 1600x1200x32 maximum.
The old boxes support 1200x1024x32 maximum.
Higher resolution has the advantage of more desktop space, but
has the disadvantage that the current crop of default fonts are QUITE
small to read. Greg is investigating bigger default fonts.
Do people think it will be a problem if some boxes labeled Dell are
1200x1024 and some are 1600x1200?
-wdc
