[CentOS] Re: Opteron Mobo Suggestions

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Thu, 2005-06-23 at 17:54 -0400, Ed Clarke wrote:
> So what is the bottom line?  None of the common board makers such as
> Asus, Iwill, Tyan, Supermicro and Gigabit make a "good" board?  So
> what should the poor server builder do?

I never said they don't make a "good" board.
I just said that they don't make "ideal" ones.

I personally like the Tyan S2895 now that more and more PCIe x4 and x8
storage controllers are hitting the market.  You don't have to use PCIe
channels for video, and it already has a NIC on CPU #2.  It's not much
more than the S2892 at all.

_Otherwise_, PCIe is _not_ a necessity on a server, especially if _all_
I/O is attached to CPU #0.  You still have PCI-X channels.

In fact, I would argue that you're not going to lose much at all by
going with an older, $300 dual-Opteron mainboard that has an AMD8131
HyperTransport tunnel.  *NOTE* that's "3" (AMD8131 = dual-PCI-X
channels) not "5" (AMD8151 = AGP 3.0) nor "1" (AMD8111 = legacy PCI).

So instead of working about the latest'n greatest Opteron mainboard, see
if you an find a $300 dual-Opteron mainboard with the AMD8131 that
supports dual-core.  Heck, dual-core is probably over-rated unless
you're really crunching a lot of data, because the memory channels are
_not_ doubled.



-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                     b.j.smith at ieee.org 
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