[H-GEN] Octek Computers

[Michael Anthon]

I exclusively use Octek computers here.  This is more because my
supplier is an old friend and gives me good prices than for any
technical reasons.  That said, I have had very little trouble with the
hardware.  I have a few older P120 machines (Rhino 6VX MB) which have
given me not a scrap of trouble, about 10 Cyrix 166 machines (Rhino 10
MB), 6 P233MMX (Rhino 12+ MB) and 2 P233MMX (Rhino 15+ MB)... oh, and a
PPro200 (Rhino Pro 6 MB).

Here is my advise (for what it's worth).

1. Don't get a Rhino 12+ motherboard.  While they work quite happily,
there seems to be some weird shit going on with the BIOS/Win98.
Initially, we couldn't get the network cards to go, but found that if we
juggled the cards around so that PnP gave the network card IRQ10 instead
of IRQ5, then they WOULD work.  Voodoo1 cards didn't work terribly well,
there was lots of faults in the bitmaps, seemed like a memory addressing
problem, but a Voodoo2 card works perfectly.  The network cards worked
quite happily under Win95 or Linux on any interrupt.  I don't think
there is anything seriously wrong with the MB, just that the BIOS is a
little screwy.

2. Don't get RealTek network cards... spend a few extra $$ and get Intel
or 3Com.  I made this mistake and it cost me several weeks of fault
finding and broken sleep.  These things seemed to work fine while
talking via a passive hub, but when plugged into a HP switch, things
started getting weird.  I'd get corrupted files on the server with no
errors reported, that sort of stuff.

3. The Cyrix 166s had pretty poor fans on them, several of them have
carked it and have been replaced.  Make sure that if you get non-intel
that the fans are good (I'm not sure if this applies to later model
CPUs)

Apart from that, the service I get is pretty good (my supplier replaced
a couple of 12+ MBs with 15+ ones so we could get our voodoo cards
going) and apart from the fans, I haven't had any reliability dramas.


Regards
Michael Anthon

TAMS Systems

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