[plug] DFI Motherboards - Sound

[Bernd Felsche]

Craig Ringer <craig at postnewspapers.com.au> writes:

>I'm wondering if a Tyan dual opteron board with dual core CPUs might be 
>the way to go once the Pacifica-enabled Opterons come out. I'll be 
>curious to see how that stacks up against the Intel / Xeon equivalent.
>I'd be very intersted in hearing the experiences of any of the folks 
>here with Tyan server boards.

I've built two servers based on AMD-powered Tyan mainboards. One
Athlon-MP (32-bit) 3 years ago and recently an Opteron. Practical
performance on a single-processor Opteron system (in a dual MB) is
superior to dual Xeon; even at a slower clock.

No problems at all with the boards. Support appears to be more than
sufficient for Linux.

Server memory (ECC, etc) is very important for reliable operation;
and it can cost more to "populate" a mainboard with say "only" 8GB
of it than to plug in a couple of dual-core Opteron.

For a file/database server, it's usually more effective to add more
memory and hard discs (and channels) than to add another processor.
When you run out of processor (i.e. it spends more than about 25% to
30% of it's time in IO processing), you upgrade the processor.

Compute servers are another fettle of kish.
-- 
/"\ Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia
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