Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 at 5:53pm, Bowie Bailey wrote
Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
Is there any reason you're locked into Xeon/FB-DIMM? SuperMicro makes many rather nice Opteron boards, with good ol' DDR SDRAM. And there aren't many areas where Xeon outperforms Opteron these days, if any.
Not really, can you recommend a comparable Opteron MB? I need PCI-X 133 for the raid card, capability of at least 32MB RAM, and preferably onboard video and LAN.
I'll assume you meant 32GB RAM. ;) In that case, your options become a bit more limited. SM doesn't have any 2 socket Opteron boards with 16 DIMM slots -- they have at most 4 slots/socket. So, to stick with SM, you'd have to either go with 4GB sticks (which, I'm guessing, may well be as pricy as FB-DIMM per GB) or go to a 4 socket board. Either way, you may not get much cost savings, but you'll still likely get a performance boost.
Yea, 32GB... :) I can't actually find any 4GB modules at the moment, but I'm sure you're right. The 2GB PC2700 ECC-Reg modules are cheaper than the DDR2 ECC-FB modules, but 16GB memory still accounts for almost half of the total cost of the server.
I'm only populating it with 16GB to start with, but I want to leave myself some headroom to increase it if needed.
The other option is to go with Tyan. They have the S3892, a dual socket board with 16 DIMM slots.
That looks like a good board. It seems to have everything I need.
The only source I could find for it is memorylabs.com. Anyone know anything about them?
Going with the dual Opteron 270 (2.0GHz) rather than the dual Xeon 5060 (3.2GHz) and the slightly cheaper RAM saves me about $320.
As an aside, 3ware now has a PCIe version (the 9590SE) in addition to the PCI-X 9550.
Any advantage to PCIe over PCI-X? I don't really know much about either other than that they are both faster than standard PCI.
Bowie Bailey spake the following on 6/21/2006 9:46 AM:
Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 at 5:53pm, Bowie Bailey wrote
Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
Is there any reason you're locked into Xeon/FB-DIMM? SuperMicro makes many rather nice Opteron boards, with good ol' DDR SDRAM. And there aren't many areas where Xeon outperforms Opteron these days, if any.
Not really, can you recommend a comparable Opteron MB? I need PCI-X 133 for the raid card, capability of at least 32MB RAM, and preferably onboard video and LAN.
I'll assume you meant 32GB RAM. ;) In that case, your options become a bit more limited. SM doesn't have any 2 socket Opteron boards with 16 DIMM slots -- they have at most 4 slots/socket. So, to stick with SM, you'd have to either go with 4GB sticks (which, I'm guessing, may well be as pricy as FB-DIMM per GB) or go to a 4 socket board. Either way, you may not get much cost savings, but you'll still likely get a performance boost.
Yea, 32GB... :) I can't actually find any 4GB modules at the moment, but I'm sure you're right. The 2GB PC2700 ECC-Reg modules are cheaper than the DDR2 ECC-FB modules, but 16GB memory still accounts for almost half of the total cost of the server.
I'm only populating it with 16GB to start with, but I want to leave myself some headroom to increase it if needed.
The other option is to go with Tyan. They have the S3892, a dual socket board with 16 DIMM slots.
That looks like a good board. It seems to have everything I need.
The only source I could find for it is memorylabs.com. Anyone know anything about them?
Going with the dual Opteron 270 (2.0GHz) rather than the dual Xeon 5060 (3.2GHz) and the slightly cheaper RAM saves me about $320.
As an aside, 3ware now has a PCIe version (the 9590SE) in addition to the PCI-X 9550.
Any advantage to PCIe over PCI-X? I don't really know much about either other than that they are both faster than standard PCI.
PCI-X is an "upgrade" to PCI, so it carries some compatibility baggage. PCI-E is designed from the ground up and, being new, doesn't have to keep any old compatibility. But there are more devices available right now for PCI-X. That is changing rapidly. As for performance, I haven't seen the numbers, but PCI-E has nowhere to go but up.
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Bowie Bailey -
Scott Silva