[geeks] Alpha check

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Thu, 17 May 2001, Ken Hansen wrote:

> I had one of these - the *real* catch is the size - this is a *full* AT 
> board, not a smaller AT (mini, baby, whatever). Also, a beefy PS is in
> order  (275 or 300 watts would be my choice, but only because you might
> add a bunch of HDs).

They are advertised as being baby AT, but it doesn't matter.  I have a
full AT case here with my P75 in it (it used to be a 486 case).
 
> I installed my board in a full-height tower case, but didn't keep it long. 
> Peformance will not be profundly better than a P/75, IMHO, for general
> use.

I know.  It is cool.  It is 64bit (remeber, want to test 64bit code), and
it is much more expandible.  I've maxed what the P75 can handle in the
memory and expansion card areas.  The Alpha takes more ram, and while it
doesn't take more expansion cards, it has scsi on the motherboard, and
maybe ethernet, saving me one or two slots.

> I've got three Alphas in my basement, with the backup/clock/nvram battery 
> slowly draining... I have 2x multias (one SCSI cage internal, the other
> PCI frame internal), both 166 MHz machines,and a DEC ALpha 200/166
> (IIRC) tricked out with 256M RAM, a 4 Gig HD & CD-ROM, and a matrox
> video card (as well as some massive video card that was supposed to be
> wonderful, but I never installed it). Never really used any of them for
> anything meaningful, probably couldn't get much for them if I went to
> sell them... I guess the Multias are good for *small* web servers -
> anyone have any exp. running Apache/MySQL/PHP on a 166 MHz Multia or
> 200/166? I could use a small intranet server and those are my
> development tools of choice...

Apache/MySQL/PHP run well on Multias.  If you are careful with how
hard you use the database, you shouldn't have too much trouble
saturating the 10mbit network port with those machines. That was my first
use of Alphas was in doing web dev on a friends Multia running those
packages.

If I weren't trying to reuse as much as I could from my current file
server/intranet server, I'd take a multia, since you can use the PCI cage
to add an extra scsi card, and an extra ethernet card and use all scsi.
My problem is that I also want several IDE drives to save money.

--
Joshua Boyd