PCI expansion

[Karlos]

Hi all,

A quick, bleary-eyed post...

Given that I have a BlizzPPC / BVision, would anybody out there recommend either the GREX or Mediator?

I'm interested in a bit of future expandibility. Do either of these solutions allow the BVision to stay connected, or would I have to sell it and get a PCI card?

What's the bus banwidth like on these things?

Cheers,

K

[Karlos]

Thanks,

Just to quickly re-iterate, do either of these products allow me to use my BVision, ot do I need to sell it?

[Karlos]

Okey dokey. So, what cards (other than Voodoo, which I hate) do we have available?

[Karlos]

Well, my Permedia2 is no slouch when it comes to 2D. My principal gripe with Voodoo goes back to the fact that a sodding Voodoo 2 burned my old 17" monitor :-x
Another gripe is that the Voodoo, whilst supporting more ram, single pass multitexturing (though not sure if Warp3D does), blend modes and faster fill ratres than the Permdia2, lacks trucolour framebuffer support for 3D. I'm working on some high level visualisation stuff and 24-bit undithered colour is an absolute must.
My final gripe is that Voodoo cards are way behind even ATI and nVidia PCI cards in terms of what theyre capable of. I realise that's not an objective gripe since you have got to go with what's supported, but it annoys nontheless :-)

Still, I may get over these prejudices if a 64Mb Voodoo5 is supported ;-)

[Karlos]

Thanks guys.

On the whole, it looks like the Mediator is the way to go on this.

I like the idea of being able to use the SDRam on the gfx card for high speed bus transfers. Pity about the Voodoo dependency though.

I wonder how much it would have cost just to stick some some SDRAM on the board itself, or failing that some DIMM sockets on the thing...