Rikard wrote regarding 'Re: [SLE] [General] Recomended Dual CPU system' on Thu, Sep 16 at 14:51:
On Thursday 16 September 2004 16.49, Danny Sauer wrote:
Andrew wrote regarding 'RE: [SLE] [General] Recomended Dual CPU system' on Thu, Sep 16 at 09:42:
IIRC the Athlon is a ridiculously scalable processor. I believe you could theoretically run over ~128 together. I think there was an article on Toms Hardware or a similar site that did a full look at the chip when it came out.
There isn't a motherboard that can actually do this, but I think this scalability has been built in to the chip since the very early days.
That's the way I remember it, too, but I didn't wanna stick a number on the post when I don't remember the actual number. I had "64" stuck in my head...
--Danny, remembering how impressive it was that one could run 4 PPros...
Sure i can get a Quad Xeon board, but that would be $$$'s My caveats against AMD is the heat, and power Have had a few friends burn out due to failing fans. Thats not my idea of a stable system
Your friends had crummy motherboards that don't shut down when the temp gets too high, crummy software that disabled the shutdown, and/or crummy heatsinks that are totally inadequate in passive mode. I've had Intel and Cyrix processors die due to inadequate cooling, too. Maybe we oughtta all run Motorola chips with super-giant heatsinks like in the new dual G4s? :) I don't have any G5's to compare to - but the hatsinks in this last batch of dual G4's that we got are massive - and there's just the one big fan in the cases. Apple may do some stupid things, but sometimes they can really nail case design.
Intel is after all Intel.. No matter what we say. Sure Xeon is costlier, but if it means a system the is 100% Linux proofed, and stable without risking hardware damage if a fan fails, I'll dish out the money.
Haven't there been problems with some Xeon boards breaking due to the weight of the heatsink required? Hardware failures are detectable long before they cause damage in most cases (use lmsensors to tell if the fan's running or not, for example). Someone applying a shock load to a system is usually an accident that was more difficult to prevent, so I'd rather not have the heatsink yanking the board in half... :) This is why I've started getting cases with the extra mounts to allow bolting the heatsink through the MB into the case. I think it's Chenbro that I'm using right now, but don't remember.
The question is; what motherboard manufacturer shall i look at? I took a peek at Tyan, they had Loads and loads of boards, all almost identical. Couldn't see too much difference in most of them. Asus has always runned nice for me. MSI apparently does dual cpu boards...
So where do i go from here?
I've had excelent luck with Asus boards. Look at the chipset on the motherboard after picking a reputable board maker. The AMD chipsets are generally pretty good, the VIA chipsets are hit-n-miss, and the ALI chipsets were junk in most cases. In my limited experience, anyway, with just a few VIA and AMD chipped boards. I've never had one of the nVidia-based boards, so I've no comment there. --Danny