Hello List, We need to acquire a dual Opteron workstation. Our choices are: - Build one ourselves , based on Tyan's Thunder K8W (S2885), with dual Opteron's 250, SATA drives, and nVidia 5950 card - Buy an IBM Intellistation A Pro with dual Opteron's 248, Ultra320SCSI drives, and nVidia Quadro FX 1100 Thanks for your suggestions, _____________________________ Ricardo R Palma SYNOPSIS SA Tel. (+51 1) 275-7523, 275-4708 email: rrpalma@synopsis.ws www.synopsis.ws
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Monday 31 May 2004 07:12, rrpalma@synopsis.ws wrote:
Hello List,
We need to acquire a dual Opteron workstation. Our choices are:
- Build one ourselves , based on Tyan's Thunder K8W (S2885), with dual Opteron's 250, SATA drives, and nVidia 5950 card
This is almost exactly I am running so I can testify that it works with suse 9.0. Things to note about this system (named rayne): - Rayne has dual Opteron 246 (2.0 Ghz) - Be carefull what memory you use. I spent several fun filled weeks debugging my system only to learn it was a memory issue. This is somewhat exacerbated with the s2885 BIOS' lack of support for memory timing adjustment. Recommend using one of the exact memories specified by Tyan or something someone on this list using using. - Rayne still runs suse 9.0 - have not upgraded to 9.1 yet - Rayne uses kernel 2.4.21-215-smp If you have any other question about this system feel free to ask. I am very pleased with performance.
- Buy an IBM Intellistation A Pro with dual Opteron's 248, Ultra320SCSI drives, and nVidia Quadro FX 1100
I'm not familiar with these systems so I don't have a lot of input. Depending on what work you are doing you might want more RAM on you video card - I think the FX1100 has 128MB v. 256MB on the FX5950.
Thanks for your suggestions,
_____________________________ Ricardo R Palma SYNOPSIS SA
Tel. (+51 1) 275-7523, 275-4708 email: rrpalma@synopsis.ws
www.synopsis.ws
Hope this helps, - Darrell - -- sused@mucus.com "Perfect! ....what am I doing?" -- Washu -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFAu2hKeo6c0kw6mZ0RAoigAKDFl1OivC9d+A/JluKVes76E9sL+wCfS26b G6oLE6oGkcGEHbkXDvo/7nE= =6Opl -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Given you are looking at a workstation, this may or may not help. We had the same decision to make last November/December when buying our application server (Java web apps). We liked the IBM, but the kicker was its 1U rack case only had space for two disk drives. It was certainly more expensive, but not unreasonably so, given IBM's (usually) excellent support. You had to buy an external disk array to expand storage. The lack of drive slots caused us to go with a Tyan Thunder S2880 based system. Although we have built many ADM/Intel boxes, the Opteron/AMD64 is new enough that we decided to let Monarch Computing build it for us. Their assembly/burnin charge is absolutely a bargain - around US $65 if I remember correctly. Given the issues we had with RAID and the SCSI drives, we are very glad we did. We tried the more recent S2882 with buildin SCSI/RAID but it would not work with SLES 8. All in all, Monarch's support has been excellent. I will probably put together our next Opteron test server. However it will be pretty basic compared to our production servers. Still, if you can afford the IBM, I would go for it - you know the video and everything is integrated and works. Hope this helps. - Richard -----Original Message----- From: rrpalma@synopsis.ws [mailto:rrpalma@synopsis.ws] Sent: Monday, May 31, 2004 7:12 AM To: suse-amd64@suse.com Subject: [suse-amd64] IBM or Tyan Hello List, We need to acquire a dual Opteron workstation. Our choices are: - Build one ourselves , based on Tyan's Thunder K8W (S2885), with dual Opteron's 250, SATA drives, and nVidia 5950 card - Buy an IBM Intellistation A Pro with dual Opteron's 248, Ultra320SCSI drives, and nVidia Quadro FX 1100 Thanks for your suggestions, _____________________________ Ricardo R Palma SYNOPSIS SA Tel. (+51 1) 275-7523, 275-4708 email: rrpalma@synopsis.ws www.synopsis.ws
Thanks Darrell.
I couldn't find any memory specified by Tyan. Where can I find that
information? What memory do you use?
Thanks,
_____________________________
Ricardo R Palma
SYNOPSIS SA
Tel. (+51 1) 275-7523, 275-4708
email: rrpalma@synopsis.ws
www.synopsis.ws
Darrell Shively
Hello List,
We need to acquire a dual Opteron workstation. Our choices are:
- Build one ourselves , based on Tyan's Thunder K8W (S2885), with dual Opteron's 250, SATA drives, and nVidia 5950 card
This is almost exactly I am running so I can testify that it works with suse 9.0. Things to note about this system (named rayne): - Rayne has dual Opteron 246 (2.0 Ghz) - Be carefull what memory you use. I spent several fun filled weeks debugging my system only to learn it was a memory issue. This is somewhat exacerbated with the s2885 BIOS' lack of support for memory timing adjustment. Recommend using one of the exact memories specified by Tyan or something someone on this list using using. - Rayne still runs suse 9.0 - have not upgraded to 9.1 yet - Rayne uses kernel 2.4.21-215-smp If you have any other question about this system feel free to ask. I am very pleased with performance.
- Buy an IBM Intellistation A Pro with dual Opteron's 248, Ultra320SCSI drives, and nVidia Quadro FX 1100
I'm not familiar with these systems so I don't have a lot of input. Depending on what work you are doing you might want more RAM on you video card - I think the FX1100 has 128MB v. 256MB on the FX5950.
Thanks for your suggestions,
_____________________________ Ricardo R Palma SYNOPSIS SA
Tel. (+51 1) 275-7523, 275-4708 email: rrpalma@synopsis.ws
www.synopsis.ws
Hope this helps, - Darrell - -- sused@mucus.com "Perfect! ....what am I doing?" -- Washu -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFAu2hKeo6c0kw6mZ0RAoigAKDFl1OivC9d+A/JluKVes76E9sL+wCfS26b G6oLE6oGkcGEHbkXDvo/7nE= =6Opl -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi Ricardo: On Tuesday 01 June 2004 08:22, rrpalma@synopsis.ws wrote:
Thanks Darrell.
I couldn't find any memory specified by Tyan. Where can I find that information? What memory do you use?
See: http://www.tyan.com/support/html/memory_s2885.html
Thanks, _____________________________ Ricardo R Palma SYNOPSIS SA
Tel. (+51 1) 275-7523, 275-4708 email: rrpalma@synopsis.ws
www.synopsis.ws
Cheers, - Darrell - -- sused@mucus.com "Perfect! ....what am I doing?" -- Washu -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFAvJPxeo6c0kw6mZ0RAhCiAKC6G+WEuZwy3scciUiYNvP6bVsATQCfYlba XXSkod2+Dqiz7s7dXBdFLis= =Q4IO -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
participants (3)
-
Darrell Shively -
Richard Mixon (qwest) -
rrpalma＠synopsis.ws