Hardware recommendations for video card etc.... dual PII 300mhz 512mb ram

I just bought one of these: http://www.tyan.com/archive/products/html/thunder2atx.html

comes with dual PII 300mhz and 512mb ram

I have read through some of the haiku blogs post etc… but non really answer my questions

  1. I have a Geforce 2 MX400 card i could use to temporarily test it but would like to buy as compatable card as posible…and cheap is good too :slight_smile:

  2. would it be better to install haiku to an ide drive or a SCSI drive?

I haven’t recieved it yet but would apreciate any suggestions.

part of the reason I bought it is the similar configuration to some of the computers BeOs originally ran on (as in the BeOs video on youtube)… perfomance comparison testing anyone :slight_smile:

I have never installed haiku (have used several vmware images however) but am somewhat familiar with Slackware Linux. So if anyone would like me to run tests on it i am game for that you may have to guide me though some things due to my lack of familiarity with Haiku/BeOs however (I catch on fast…)

cb88 that remindes me i also need a power supply :wink:

I bought a similar system about 2 years back & still have it today. A dual 350Mhz P2, 512MB ECC RAM,etc.

Your Geforce 2 MX should work really well. ( I have one of these too ).

The Haiku video drivers will support upto ATI X800 & Nvidia 7900. ATI video cards upto 9800 work really good; anything beyond that, the Radeon X series, may work and a few may not work properly. For Nvidia I believe upto 6800 is supported really good and beyond that support may be good, ok or bad.

Some other chipset video cards are supported too but I believe you would want to stick with ATI or Nvidia.

PATA IDE is the best to install to. BeOS had support for older SCSI controller. Haiku may have this too. So, you can see if SCSI works but IDE is the safer bet to stick with.

I have a dual Pentium III 650 on a Gygabyte GA-6BXD, 512 Mb RAM, and a Matrox G200 video card. It used to be a dual Pentium II 350, but it is much speedier now :slight_smile:

For the video card, you have to make sure that it is compatible with your motherboard’s AGP slot, which is probably a 2x. Late AGP 4x and 8x will not fit, because they have different notches (see Wikipedia for pictures of card and slot notches). Compatible cards are nearly all Matrox, nVidia up to series 4, Radeon up to 8000, and probably some newer model. Your MX400 should be perfect because it’s also supported by Haiku drivers.

For the hard disk: forget SCSI. Haiku doesn’t have any SCSI chipset support for the time being. Just go ATA; recent ATA drives are also faster than older SCSI models. I doubt you are going to buy a new 15k RPM hard drive for that, don’t you?

This way you’ll get a nice R5/Haiku machine.

Regards,

Gabriele

actually i might be able to pickup some fiber interface 15,000 rpm drives tomorrow X.x for free… so we can only find an adapter… well be in business if we could net boot haiku i think i could convince they guys to join up on one of the haiku distributed projects for the last couple days the cluster is running. BTW we have 20 dual PII promised and various others ranging from 2 sparc-10s (40mhz) to a quad core that we might try to overclock (with refrigeration to at least 4.5-5 or better Ghz)

we are planning to run the grid engine on our cluster since

this PC is going on a Linux cluster for the next couple months as the database server and after that it will be a haiku only PC … (ok i might stick Linux on a second partition :slight_smile: )

I will have to get another gforce card for it since currently i only have a trident 9xxx which is ancient and mmight only do vesa