What's your coolest ISA card?( was Re: IBM 5150 PC)

From: Master of all that Sucks <vance_at_ikickass.org>
Date: Tue Aug 7 12:18:25 2001

On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, r. 'bear' stricklin wrote:

> I'd really like one of those Microway i860 multi-processor EISA cards I
> used to see advertised all the time in the PC rags.

I have a couple. I don't know if it is the same card you are talking
about, but I have a couple of different kinds of cards which are
multiprocessor i860 on an EISA.

> Probably the two most interesting ISA cards I own are an Iterated Systems
> fractal compression accelerator, and a 3-board, 2-slot graphics card by
> Matrox which I haven't identified yet.
>
> Interesting to note that even beyond these two cards, that my most
> interesting ISA or EISA boards are the least useful and the biggest
> pains-in-the-bottom.

I've never had problems with EISA cards, but I've always been able to find
the config disks.

> > I actually collect ISA cards that have interesting processors on them
> > (i.e. 80186, 68000, 68020, 386 486, etc.)
>
> The old WD7000 cards used Z80s. The NE3200 has an 80186 on, and the old
> Mylex DCE376 caching SCSI card has an 80376sx (386sx for embedded
> systems), but they're both EISA. DPT SCSI cards also have historically
> used 680x0 CPUs---my PCI 2144UW has a 40 MHz 68040. I don't know if cards
> like this fall within your mandate.

Don't forget about the variety of coprocessed PCI cards out there. Like
the Mylex DAC960 series, which uses two identical custom Mylex chipsets
and an i960CF for two-channel coprocessed RAID, and the IBM ServeRAID.
The ServeRAID II has three Adaptec AIC-7880 UW-SCSI chipsets and a PowerPC
403e _at_ 66? MHz for three-channel coprocessed RAID. Then there are all the
SGI VME64 graphics cards, etc, many of which have interesting processors
on them.

Peace... Sridhar
Received on Tue Aug 07 2001 - 12:18:25 BST