[openbeos] Re: Best new hardware for BeOS

Hi Magnus,

On 2006-09-30 at 03:07:39 [+0200], Magnus Hellman <magnush@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
wrote:
> I'm about to upgrade my trusty 2x450 MHz PII machine and I want something 
> that will continue to run my BeOS R5 system.
> 
> I'm only going to buy a new motherboard, an Intel CPU, and 1GB of RAM.  I 
> will be using my existing hard disk and Matrox G200 video card (I'm not 
> fussed about sound if it doesn't work, not yet anyway).
> 
> I don't think I can afford a Core 2 Duo so I'm leaning towards an Intel 
> Pentium D.  Maybe I can afford the cheapest Core 2 Duo - is it a good buy?

I have R5 running on a Pentium D 930 and it works, although it seems to have 
strange problems when both cores are running. It is hard to describe the 
precise symptoms of performance problems, but fact is that the system is much 
slower when both cores are running compared with only one active core. 
The bottleneck seems to be related to I/O, but I have not been able to track 
this down yet, perhaps it is a problem with R5's SMP setup code, I don't know. 

However, the system is stable no matter if it uses one or two cores. So if you 
can live with R5 using only one core, I'd say go for the Pentium D.

BTW: I did not have to apply any special patches for R5, only my other, 
BONE-enabled system required the RAM-limiting bootloader (just as Cian has 
said).

cheers,
        Oliver

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