Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 22:11:03 -0700 From: "Charles Burns" <burnscharlesn@hotmail.com> To: hawk@fac13.ds.psu.edu, vince@oahu.WURLDLINK.NET, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: the AMD factor in FreeBSD Message-ID: <F1471Np7vXee4fDGCl90000652f@hotmail.com>
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> > That's all that matters since I can't tell the difference for > > normal day to day operations with Windows between a PII400 and a >PIII933. > > I guess I'm not a gamer. > >It's not just gaming. Heavy computational work is my normal >daily routine. With about $5k in funding standing by, we're holding >off for the dual athlon boards with ddr. > >We also just specced out a server/computational platform, and found >we could match $20k of RS/6000 with about $12k of Dell PIII with >2G of Crucial memory and 3d party *big* drives--We'd have had about >72 or 144G of storage from ibm/sun, If you are going for price/performance Sun and IBM aren't really in that market. They go more for the super ultra reliable extremely scalable systems it seems. You may look into Alpha if you are after absolute max raw computing power for the buck. At certain price levels, Alpha (at least did) win hands down. The systems are made by Compaq, but their high-end systems don't suck like their consumer systems do. If you would like to build your own array from scratch, Seagate makes a 160GB Ultra/160 SCSI drive. Those should do it. :-) >probably just ultrascsi, but >we'll have 300G of Raid 5 u160 with a ready standby drive and a 15krpm >swap drive . . . and about $7,000 left over . . which means that >rather than going $5k over budget, we're enough under budget for >an extra blade 100 or bsd box . . . It's just a pity that the money >rules for this machine require it to be received before June 30 (after >going through University bid/purchase processes), otherwise it >could wait for dual 1.5Ghz palominos, too . . . Don't bet the farm that AMD will have SMB boards by then. Chances are that they will, but their roadmap, IIRC, says "2nd half" which just begins in June. You may also want to consider that the boards will be first-generation SMP. While they will almost certainly be far, far (FAR) better than the average 1st gen board because it is using a chipset that is perfectly good for single processor systems and because the boards are likely being marketed as server/workstation class (hence the predicted $600+ price tag), they may have some problems to iron out. I don't know how important these systems will be, but when I build one that needs 24/7 uptime I always use parts that have been out and tested in the field for a few months. One example that further emphasized this strategy was when I read that Anandtech used MSI K7T-Pro2 boards for servers that "worked fine" for a logn time but had occasional hard lockups (i.e. system would not post unless unplugged for several seconds). While Anandtech doesn't seem to be the smartest when it comes to servers (They use Windows, for example) the example still does apply. Sort of. _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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