Evaluate a Typical System's Speed

[honghsu]

I have general questions regarding a typical system's speed and wonder this is right place to ask these questions. If this is not, would you point out where I can post.

With following typical components on a motherboard:
10K RPM DRAM,
Intel 850 chipset with 64-bits Data bus width and 400MHz Data Rate,
32-bit/64-bit PCI bus (33MHz/66MHz)

As speed of these components are measured by rates, I am wondering how
one can evaluate the system's speed roughly using MB/sec so that one can see potential bottleneck or trend of improvement. Does Intel 850's 400MHz data rate fully used or not on 66MHz bus speed in this case?

In addition, if one likes to add a 1GB Network Interface Card for clustering two same machines, should he add a 32-bit NIC card or 64-bit NIC with above configurations in terms of performance? And why is that?

Your help will be appreciated,
-Hong
4/7/2002

[rextex]

See the Benchmarking Forum area.There are so many tips and tools listed there, it is too long to list here!