[CentOS] Re: Opteron Mobo Suggestions -- not a server board at all!

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Thu, 2005-06-23 at 23:06 -0400, Peter Arremann wrote:
> The board: Asus K8N-DL 
> http://www.asus.com.tw/products.aspx?l1=9&l2=39&l3=174&model=456&modelmenu=1

Um, that's _not_ a server board at all.  That's a workstation board with
virtually no I/O.  It's designed for pure computational need and _no_
I/O at all.  That's not me being "anal" -- I mean, there is _no_ I/O on
that thing!

You've got the PCIe x16 for video, and a PCIe x1 for maybe an audio, NIC
or low-end storage card.  Unless you get a PCIe x4 or x8 storage card
and put it in that PCIe x16 slot, you're going to be sharing _all_ I/O
on a legacy, 133MBps PCI slot.

And it would be nice to have a server NIC that is connected via PCI-X,
and not a "client" designed NIC that is in the nForce4 chipset.

You might as well have an old, 100MHz Pentium processor mainboard.  I'm
dead serious here, the 100MHz Pentium would have no trouble handling the
legacy PCI interconnect that system is giving you.  It is a
_workstation_ mainboard (and assumes your workstation doesn't need much
I/O ;-).

> The place to buy: ZipZoomFly.com among others - $274.99 (free shipping)
> http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=240430
> or NewEgg $270.00 (plus shipping)
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131059&CMP=OTC-pr1c3watch&ATT=Motherboards
> both in stock :-)

For $20-50 more, you can have a mainboard with an AMD8131 and dual PCI-X
1.0 slots.  That's 533MBps per 64-bit @ 66MHz card (such as a 3Ware
Escalade 8506-4 or 8506-8), or 1066MBps for newer 64-bit @ 133MHz PCI-X
cards (like an LSI Logic MegaRAID 300X-8).

> Only two issues with the board - memory support is supposedly not so great and 
> Asus themselves claims the board doesn't exist :-) Go to their webpage and go 
> through the links - no dual opteron boards... Go to the search box, enter the 
> name of the board and you'll get all you need though...

This is _not_ a server board at all.

You'd be far better off getting an old dual-Pentium III with a
ServerWorks IIILE or IIIHE chipset for $100-200, and some old 800-933MHz
P3 processors for $50/each, while reusing some old PC100-133 memory.
You'll at least have a 533MBps (64 at 66) PCI slot or two for storage and
NIC.

You're just asking for trouble putting everything on a shared, legacy
133MBps PCI bus in a server.  Unless you start using the PCIe slots,
although the GbE NIC in the nForce4 doesn't have much SRAM, although the
typical Brocomm designs in the PCI-X versions typically do have about 8x
the receive SRAM buffer (which is needed for servers).

This is _not_ me being "anal."  I install _low-cost_ networks all-the-
time.  I do it on a dime.  And this board for $270 is _not_ what you
want in a server.  Trust me on this!  Splurge $20-50 more and get
something with at least an AMD8131.


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