[CentOS] SuperMicro X7DBE with CentOS4?

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

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.

The other option is to go with Tyan.  They have the S3892, a dual socket 
board with 16 DIMM slots.

As an aside, 3ware now has a PCIe version (the 9590SE) in addition to the 
PCI-X 9550.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University