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