Processor Power vs Memory
 

Hello,

I want to set up Debian for a LAMP environment. I have a decision to make. I have two machines which I can set it up on. One is an abit LX6 board which has four Dimms for 128MB RAM with a slot 1 P2 at 233mhz. The other is a Asus MEB-VM mobo with a socket 370 P2 at 400mhz. But with the memory I have I can only get 64MB ram in it due to it having only two slots. I dont really want to buy anything to upgrade. Which option do you think I should take. I will run probably kde on this machine. Thank you.

hmm,

i think kde will be mega sluggish on either machine...

as a pure guess, i'd be inclined to favour the machine with more memory, but, frankly, the only way to know is to try both!

i'm also thinking that gnome might be a better bet under these circumstances, or even a super lightweight window manager such as ice wm... both are less bloated than kde..

as an indicator, i installed yellow dog linux on a power mac (yes, i know, but i haven't tried a low-spec pc!) with a g3 processor running 330MHz, 64MB RAM. now, those motorola processors are somewhat more efficient than pentiums.... but, oh boy was it slow under kde. gnome was better, but it was still no ball of fire....

have fun..

are any of the mmx cause id go for the one with the mmx in the p2

you can compile either to match your cpu which will give you a little more speed but not much

thanks for your replies
Ok so mabey I will drop the gnome or kde. Currently I have some window manager on the 266. I don't know what it is called but it seems to run fine only it's very basic. After I login I run startx and it basically has a blank greenish screen and when I click in the window a menu pops up. But it runs fine on the 266 so maby I will just use that. Both chips have mmx.

aah you're using twm the X default

go for the ram

you can try openbox or any other box

RAM will make the most difference here, but go with Fluxbox for your WM.

Agreed, the system with more memory is pretty much guaranteed to be faster here. -- J.W.

RAM!!! 128megs is good, and a PII 233 will provide usable responsiveness even with a full KDE setup (with all the goodies--antialiasing to transparencies to large icons).

In contrast, 64megs will be problematic and may not even be able to load reliably with KDE.

it'll go ok, just bl**dy slowly!!!

from experience, fancy graphics, eye candy (read: big user interfaces, such as KDE!), etc, chomp up RAM, big time. processor speed is more important if you're into heavily maths intensive stuff, such as video rendering, etc...

i've got a fairly lowly 1.1GHz Athlon machine, 256MB RAM; the only thing that really stumps it is editing video (which i do quite a lot of)... for everything else i do, it's quite fast enough.

Oh, and I use KDE 3.2 - I do like KDE...

Like everybody said. Go with the system with more memory. If you want to spare some moeny you can get a socket 370 to slot 1 to take advantage of the 400 MHz. Though you have to check the motherboard manual to find out the maximum speed rating.

also you may be able to flash your bios to a newer version to support higher speeds, you sould be able to get the speed up to the maxium allowable to you sucket