AMD Cleaning Intel's Clocks 6724

On Thursday 08 December 2005 01:40, Erik Funkenbusch stood up and spoke the following words to the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.advocacy...:

Well, I'm having Lipton Ice Tea at the moment - no advertising intended.

I agree. I consider it more or less a "revolutionary concept". I feel that this is something most motherboard-chip makers should contemplate, instead of sticking to the older NB-SB concept.

I also prefer doing my research before buying hardware, and price is usually not too big a consideration. I'm known to have an expensive taste, but I'm not exactly the needless spender, so when I buy something, I want it to be quality stuff.

You've just reminded me that I still do have an older GeForce AGP card lying around here from that faulty AMD machine. ;-)

Yes, I know what AGP is, but the reason this motherboard doesn't have an AGP slot is that it's a server motherboard. It has an on-board ATI Rage (or something) which I don't use.

The videocard that's currently in the system - and that's the one component that I didn't actually pick myself - is a Hercules with an ST MicroElectronics Kyro chip. Not exactly a great card - only 16 MB - and there isn't any native driver for the Linux 2.6 kernel, so I have to run it in framebuffer mode.

I bought the GeCube as that Hercules is dying - and obviously getting closer to the time of rest now... :-

Yes, the quality of SCSI is also one of the main reasons why I prefer it, plus their suitability for multi-threaded environments and 24-7 uptimes.

Ah yes, now I see what you mean. Yes, SATA is an implementation of the SCSI protocol over the IDE bus.

On-board NIC's are a must these days. I don't think there's much that a plug-in NIC could offer that an on-board wouldn't. My motherboard also has two on-board EtherExpress 10-100 NIC's, and they do fine.

Newer Intel server boards even come with on-board GigaBit Ethernet adapters, I believe.

Well, their AMD-760 chipset was quite good. I did however not like the feature of its successor - the AMD-761 - which used up to 1 GB of the RAM for caching of the PCI bus. I think caching should be best left to the OS.

Well, hard disk do of course also have a cache, but that's different. One more reason why there shouldn't be any extra caching by hardware. It'd be a waste of resources.

16 GB? A 32-bit box running in PAE mode or do you already have an EM64T box?

Part of the hardware upgrade that this machine has coming to it is an Adaptec 2130 SLP U320 SCSI RAID controller. I think it also supports RAID 5 but I don't have that many disks.

Well, the case for this box here is an Intel-approved deskside tower. It's deeper and slightly wider than the typical consumer-PC full-tower case. It only has one 3.5" bay (for the floppy). Everything else is installed in 5.25" bays, using brackets.

This allows for extra airflow around the hard disks, and I've also got coolers underneath the hard disks themselves. Pretty noisy. ;-)

Indeed. Very confusing for the consumer.

Well, SCSI-wise, Seagate is quite good, although I personally favor IBM-Hitachi.

In fact, one of the hard disks in this machine and one of the two U160 SCSI cards come from that toasted machine. Strangely enough, they were and still are perfectly fine.

My Plextor CD-RW also comes from that machine and also still functions perfectly well. My Jaz drive on the other hand was toast too.

I do intend to have a mirror, using two identical hard disks. I will however still have my old hard disks - which are currently in this machine - on which I will make regular back-ups of the mirror.

My machines are on UPS'es now, and the UPS'es themselves are connected to a surge protector. And then still, when I feel that lightning is getting a bit too close to my taste, I unplug the UTP cable from the cable modem.

My ISP also came to install a ground lead to the cable connector after that issue with the lightning surge, but I don't fully trust that. It's far too thin a piece of wire to my taste.

Yes, that is also what I experienced.

Well, since both AMD and Intel have their pros and cons at the moment, I'm still in doubt as to whether I will be upgrading this machine or invest in a newer one - with scavenged parts from this one - and go for 64-bit. I think if I choose 64-bit, I'd be opting for a dual Opteron dual core system.

Hopefully not a scary one. Who knows what may have built a nest inside that case... ;-)

-- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (Registered GNU-Linux user #223157)