Chris Cruft

Well, the upgrade is finished.  And, boy, what a differences.  Probably the most impressive was the video upgrade.  The better support for the ATI card really makes a difference in the quality (24-bit color versus 16-bit color) and resolution.  Not to mention performance.  So here is what I upgraded to:

CPU: 800MHz Pentium III (Coppermine) with 133MHz FSB support

Reports 1603 BogoMIPs.  Note that with the FSB set to 133MHz, I may be overclocking this processor.

RAM: 512MB on 100MHz local bus (1×256, 2×128)

I should have had 640MB RAM (2×256MB + 1×128MB) but the seller made a mistake in his advertisement on eBay and ended up having to refund some money.  I also found that one of my existing 128MB SIMMs did not work reliably at 100MHz, even though it was rated for this speed.

Video: ATI Radeon 7200 (R100 or R6)

Smokin!  With the Dell 1702FP display, this gets me 1280×1024x24 resolution.  With a minor change in the BIOS, I was able to get it to run at AGP 4x speeds.

Audio: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live!

Unexpected bonus, this replaced the previous Asus SB clone card.  It looks nicer and runs the EMU10k1 chip which seems to be pretty popular.

NIC: Linksys NC100

Another slight improvement over the old 3Com 3C595 card.

Today I upgraded ducati to Fedora Core 5. It was really uneventful. But it really pointed out the performance limitations of ducati. So I looked into the obvious upgrades for the Tyan S1854 Trinity 400-based system:

Memory: ducati has 320MB of RAM. The motherboard will hold up to 768MB of PC133 SDRAM in three slots. Currently it has two 128MB PC133 chips and one 64MB chip that seems to run at only 66MHz. I’m going to buy two 256MB PC133 chips to increase the local bus speed by at least 50% and increase memory by more than 100%.

Processor: ducati currently has a 450MHz Pentium II (aka Deschutes). It reports a BogoMIPS rating of 904. The motherboard (the 99PONA Revision M model) will hold a 1 GHz FPGA Socket 370 processor, but I found a nice Pentium III 800MHz with a 100MHz FSB rating. That should yield a BogoMIPs rating of around 1600 (see reference 2).

cpu_pentium_ii_iii_celeron

http://www.tyan.com/support/html/cpu_pentium_ii_iii_celeron.html

Screen clipping taken: 15/05/2006, 16:55

Video: ducati currently has a crappy old Diamond Fire GL1000 AGP (1x) video card that can barely get out of its own way. It also shows some compatibility problems with X windows. I found an ATI Radeon 7200 (R6) video card at a good price. That should both boost performance (AGP 4x versus AGP 1x) and increase resolution to the maximum of the monitor (1280×1024x24).

Disk: ducati currently has two IDE drives in place. One is an ancient 2GB unit, and the other is a slightly more modern 20GB model. I’m going to leave them for now, but one day a higher-speed drive will be in order.

BIOS: ducati currently has Award BIOS version 1.07. That is the most recent version according to Tyan’s website (reference 4).

Interesting Commands:

# cat /proc/iomem

# free -m

# dmesg | grep “MEM avail”

References:

1. http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id=8553
2. http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/BogoMips/bogo-list.html#AEN272
3. http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-fc5.html#boot
4. http://www.tyan.com/products/html/trinity400.html

Excellent reference

5. http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_5_installation_notes.html