Thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely take another look at dual Athlons.
I still have some questions, though. Is Intel's 533 MHz fsb a real advantage? Or only with certain kinds of RAM? Some benchmarks show the Athlon is a real fast cruncher, so for most things it probably gives you the most bang for the buck. Btw did anybody see the review of AMD's Barton chip at Ace's? ( http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=50000364 --yea! Pricewar!) . They used a Photoshop benchmark and the P4 3.06 GHz was best at most but not all filters. Ace's said that Photoshop had been optimized for SMP and hyperthreading. Would that be true of Gimp? I'd think stuff like Gaussian blur would be the same or similar. Dang I wish they'd use Gimp for some benchmarks. Loading up on RAM I know is good, but which kind? RDRAM, DDRAM, DRDRAM, SDRAM, DDR SDRAM--ECC or not?--ack!--just give me speed, reliablity and let me keep my shirt. Even with a couple gigs of RAM I'm going to be swapping. Is an SCSI drive worth the extra price? I'm thinking no because I can get a 7200rpm ide for $40, or a 10K RPM IDE drive at a fair price, but if somebody has good things to say about their 15K SCSI I'd like to hear it. Do better latency and seek time make much of a difference? Are the 15Krpm Cheetah's and Fujitsu's really as quiet as the reviewers say? What's the optimal balance between transfer rate and access time for working on large .xcfs? Finally, would a smaller main drive (with / /usr /home /tmp and swap) be faster? I was thinking it would be most efficient to have a small fast drive with a second, larger drive for storage. Am I wrong to suppose a large main drive would slow me down? Does putting the swap on the first sector still matter, or have advances in hard disk technology made this inconsequenstial? Thanks again. Peace, Shawn. _______________________________________________ Gimp-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
