Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!dogie.macc.wisc.edu!vms.macc.wisc.edu
From: dinda@vms.macc.wisc.edu (Peter Dinda)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: INFORMATION ON 386's
Message-ID: <2398@dogie.macc.wisc.edu>
Date: 10 Sep 89 01:31:18 GMT
Sender: news@dogie.macc.wisc.edu
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Organization: University of Wisconsin Academic Computing Center
Lines: 41

In article <12636@s.ms.uky.edu>, munish@ms.uky.edu (Munish Mehra) writes...

>Does anyone have any information or pointers to the following :
> 
>Reliability and Performance of 386 Motherboards, and other 386
>associated hardware.
>So far I've read that the Micronics motherboard is the best.
> 
>Experiences with Mail order houses dealing in 386 systems.
> 
>I have been following the CompuAdd discussion, so we need not
>go into that again.
> 
>If I have enough responses I'll summarize the information.

Well, I've been the proud new owner of a Northgate 386/20SM
for all of two days now and I'm very happy with it so far.
Northgate makes their own motherboards - thus their almost too
good to be true prices.   Although you are probably not interested
in a complete system, the NG does bring up a good point: 
interleaved memory versus a RAM cache to provide zero-wait-state 
performance.  Northgate uses the interleave scheme and it seems
to work very well if the results of the PC Labs Benchmark I just
tried are accurate - the machine ranks only about 20% behind a
IBM model 70/25!

If you're interested in Northgate, the NG "systems consultant"
I have (who seems to be a very knowledgeable gentleman who 
went to school in Madison (yea)) is John Alstrup.


Disclaimer:  No relationship to Northgate other than customer
(and starving student!)

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