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Date:      Thu, 05 Apr 2007 13:48:40 -0400
From:      Nathan Vidican <nvidican@wmptl.com>
To:        "Don O'Neil" <lists@lizardhill.com>
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Recommended SMP Hardware
Message-ID:  <46153678.7010409@wmptl.com>
In-Reply-To: <00e001c777a2$8fb5c490$0600020a@mickey>
References:  <00e001c777a2$8fb5c490$0600020a@mickey>

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Don O'Neil wrote:
> I'm getting ready to obsolete one of my old dual P2-800 servers and wanted
> to get some suggestions from you all... I'm going to be building a new
> server to replace it and need more power, but not a TON more power...
> Something along the lines of dual 2.5 GHz processors with 4 GB RAM should be
> more than enough.
>
> Any one have some suggestions for lower priced dual processor motherboards
> and CPU combos? Athlon, Xeon, P4, whatever, doesn't really matter. I'd like
> to hear from some of you who are actually using certain combos in production
> and your experiences (good or bad) with them and FreeBSD 6.2.
>
> Thanks!
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
>   

I guess that all depends on what you mean by 'lower priced'... We're 
using home-built dual AMD Opteron boxes that have performed excellent 
over the last two years. Mind you, when we built them here they were a 
bit more pricey than they can be had for now - but even then complete in 
rack mount chassis with ECC registered memory and a terabyte of RAID 5 
using 3Ware Escalades - we still came in under $4500 (Canadian; approx 
$3200 US at the time). We based them on MSI motherboards (K8D-Master's 
which have S-ATA or SCSI built in), using WDC RAID Edition S-ATA drives 
and 3Ware 9500 series controllers (which were VERY new at the time ~ 
$500 /each).

If I had to do it all over again - I'd go the same route, although 
perhaps with a slightly cheaper motherboard (the ones we used were 
$720/each and we utilized very few of the on-board goodies - they 
support up to 24GB ram, we've got 4gb in them so kinda overkill). Also - 
most newer boards support dual-core cpu's as well... if you're looking 
for top-notch, but bottom dollar SMP - try a higher end single opteron 
board with dual core CPU.

Just my two cents - hope it helps. BTW - we're running 6.1 - 6.2 and 
variants on them now with no difficulties.


--
Nathan Vidican
nvidican@wmptl.com
Windsor Match Plate & Tool Ltd.
http://www.wmptl.com/



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