Feizhou <feizhou at graffiti.net> wrote: > Well, the OP probably is stuck with a processor capable of > frying eggs...which is not possible with your suggestion. > My colleagues take their sweaters/warmers off due to the Dell > cum heater box besides their feet in the office. Socket-478/LGA-775 Netburst architecture (Pentium 4) is the absolute worst in heat generation, even at 90nm. They've brought it down some with the dual-core solutions, but it's still way too high. Newer Socket-754/939/940 Athlon 3000-3500+ and Opteron "HE" (or 150+) only generate 31-55W heat. Dual-core versions are 70-110W. The best is the newer, but little known Socket-479 Pentium Pro-III architecture (Pentium M), and uses as little as 21W. The 2.0-2.26GHz versions will typically best all but the highest clock Pentium 4. They even offer it with the PCIe/DDR2 i915 chipset, although Socket-479 is a major mark-up (but far better than it was just a little bit ago). > an Intel chipset motherboard seems to be the safest bet. Not always. But for the most part, the new ICH7 peripherals on the i9x5 are fairly well supported now. Ironically enough, Intel does _not_ make good server chipsets, they _never_ have. The only Intel chipsets for servers that are worthy are the E7200/7500 series -- designed by ServerWorks (now owned by Broadcom). The last server chipset Intel designed was the NX450 -- well over 5 years ago. The ServerWorks ServerSet III series was a godsend back in the P3/Xeon days. The GrandChampion (GC) series for P4/Xeon was also powerful until Intel came out with the E7500 series based on it, and then the more entry-level E7200 series after that. The absolute best server "chips" (since AMD HyperTransport is no longer a "fixed" chipset design), are the AMD8000 series -- especially the dual-channel AMD8131/8132 PCI-X 1.0/2.0 HyperTransport tunnels. The AMD8131/8132 paired with newer logic like the nForce Pro series for PCIe and peripherals, it's a very powerful workstation and/or server combination for Opteron. > Say no to VIA. > (warning: biased opinion from a Chinese guy who has been > burnt too many times by chipsets from said Taiwanese company > in both consumer and server boards and therefore has not tried > any of the latest chipsets from said company) ViA is great for ViA C3/Eden platforms. They typically lag in features, so by the time the leading-edge desktop ViA chipsets get peripheral support in Linux, they are adopted by the low-power C3/Eden platforms. So yes, for desktop, ViA changes their peripheral logic way too much. That keeps the kernel developers adding PCI IDs, tracking little variants in their ATA and other logic, etc... ViA has _not_ switched to native HyperTransport on AMD, and are still using their VLink PCI-based interconnect. But ViA has _never_ designed a server chipset either. I was very impressed with nVidia's ability to keep PCI IDs and other peripherals consistent from the nForce2/MCP-02 through the single-chip nForce4 (integrated MCP-04). Unfortunately, that seems to have ended with the new nForce4x0/GeForce61x0 (C51/NV44), it uses new PCI IDs and other things so you need a recent kernel. E.g., FC4's installer 2.6.11 didn't cut it -- the updated 2.6.14 did, however. Although I have to had it to nVidia, they at least give you an installable driver set that you can do on a minimal install. I.e., I installed FC4 with kernel 2.6.11, installed the nForce platform driver with its "nvnet" for 10/100[/1000] NIC, ran yum update, then switched back to the GPL "forcedeth" after the reboot into kernel 2.6.14 (did not have to re-install the nForce platform drivers). -- Bryan J. Smith | Sent from Yahoo Mail mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org | (please excuse any http://thebs413.blogspot.com/ | missing headers)