Assembling Lance

By Jerry Pournelle

February 24, 2003

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Column 271 (Continued from the Previous Week)

New Systems

We have three new machines this month. The first is "Lance," a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 533 MHz Front Side Bus speed system built with a PC Power and Cooling case and Intel D845PEBT2 motherboard. There's a gigabyte of Crucial Ram, and a (parallel ATA) Seagate 60 gigabyte hard drive. Another machine almost identical to this one will make use of a Seagate serial ATA hard drive, using not the on-board Serial ATA controller that comes with the Intel board, but a much faster one from Promise Technology. The third system is the wonderful new H-P/Compaq Tablet PC.

Note that the second system I mentioned will be an experimental test bed and will get a lot of innovative stuff. The first, Lance, will not: It's for Mrs. Pournelle, and once it's done and running I am unlikely to be allowed to open the case or do anything else to it for years. That's why we've spent even more time than usual obsessing over what parts he gets.

Lance has a Crucial-built ATI RADEON 9700 Pro video board. That's about the fastest graphics card I know of, and I've been running an ATI-built 9700 Pro for over a month with no problems: In fact I'm writing this on "Sable" (see my November, 2002 column), a 3.06 GHz Intel D850EMVR Desktop Board with Hyperthreading. Sable also has the ATI RADEON 9700 Pro and the text is beautiful, one reason I like ATI boards: NVIDIA boards don't tend to have such nice looking text. Incidentally, the best board for text display seems to be the Matrox, but Matrox has just about vanished.

At least, Matrox has disappeared from my screen. The last product of theirs I have is the Maxtrox G550, a fine dual-monitor-capable AGP4X video display card, though of no great prominence for 3D. Over at the Byte Graphics Lab, my son Alex and Contributing Editor David Em have been putting the new Matrox Parhelia card through its paces.

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