Bryan J. Smith wrote: > 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. Heh, that is exactly what they have. > > Newer Socket-754/939/940 Athlon 3000-3500+ and Opteron "HE" > (or 150+) only generate 31-55W heat. Dual-core versions are > 70-110W. Still below the 120W+ of the P4. > > 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). Yeah, read about it quite a while ago when it knocked out the P4 2.8 processor. > > >>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. Thanks to their providing docs. > > 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. Yes, these are the chums in use in the newer boxes I used to admin. I loved the 3ware + riser card fiasco though. > 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. The problems I have are related to their hardware, not whether there are good drivers or not. The poor latencies just won't let me use a Pinnacle DC10 board without crashing. > > But ViA has _never_ designed a server chipset either. Yeah, whatever. Tyan come out with a board for servers based on a VIA chipset for Pentium III cpus and so I got to deal with them. > > 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). > > I cannot wait for a promise by a Nvidia rep about their future chipsets using SATA NCP technology that will allow an open source driver to be written to be acted on.