OFB Community Mailing Lists

[Ed Hurst]

Brothers and Sisters, I am puzzled, though not shocked. I struggled for
a few weeks with a Tyan Tomcat 1815e and a P3/1Ghz CPU. The thing was
too slow for a 1-gig. It ran about as fast as an older 500Mhz machine I
once had. My friends and I struggled to make the BIOS accept the
on-chip L2 cache, but it refused.

Yesterday I was given a pile of old computer parts by a business in the
county. Included was a pair of Microstar mobos. With a 750Mhz Athlon,
using the same RAM and the same harddrive (using the already installed
OS), this thing runs like fire. Under the P3, it took about 3 hours
recompile the system core on FreeBSD 4.11. Under the Athlon, it was
less than two hours.

1. Is the Athlon that much better than a P3?
2. Could it be the mobo is so much faster internally? (Microstar KT7
Pro2-A)

More: using the same video card (Voodoo 3 3000) now KDE runs like a
light GUI. I click on Konsole and it fills the screen instantly. It's
really that fast. Opera takes about 3 seconds. Mozilla 1.75 opens in
about 8 seconds. With the old setup, it was at least double that, with
visible layers of the window appearing as slow re-paints on the screen.
Now it appears whole. This, with only 16MB VRAM.

Hardware gurus, what am I seeing?


Ed Hurst
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