Double checking - dual 2400+

[Mr.Guvernment]

hey all

i have been asked to make a good web server system and i want to go duallie AMD.....


will the 2400+ T-breds need anything special to run in a dual board?

i *might* be ordering from this site so my choices are

http://store.yahoo.com/directron/dual.html

i was going to go with GA-7DPXDW-P - thoughts??



however i would like a newer dual board if possible- maybe even one with RAID or SCSI controller - but something under $300 ???

[cmcquistion]

You shouldn't have any trouble with those chips and running them in dual mode.

If this is for a critical server, you may want to consider Tyan's motherboards. They aren't the fastest dual AMD boards, but they have the best reputation for stability. They are also the only manufacturer that makes 760MPX boards with onboard SCSI (I think.)

You may also want to consider just biting the bullet and buying real MP's. If this is for a customer, where you aren't going to be on site, you don't want an MP mod to go bad and have them mad at you for it. Just a thought. At my business, I run our main File Server on an Asus A7M266-D with modded XP's, but I'm the Sys Admin, so if something goes wrong, I'm here to fix it (and generally the first to know.)

If I were to build a server for a customer that I don't work for (on-site), I would use real MP's and I might use a Tyan motherboard, if the server was critical, or if it needed onboard SCSI or other goodies that Tyan offers.

P.S. If the server is just going to be home to one web site, a dually is probably overkill. A fast dually is really overkill. The only time you're really going to be using much of the system resources is if they are running massive databases on the website, or something really intensive.

[IFMU]

To add in my rusty 2 coppers here pretty much everything he said hits it right on the head.
From what I recall on researching all the boards for this chipset the only one that does have onboard scsi is the Tyan, Thunders to be specific. The Tigers didnt, I know. As for Asus, Chaintech and MSI, none had scsi.
The Gigabyte has one of their 2 with onboard RAID, but it is IDE.

If you want to double check that, check my sticky on the top in here by me. It has links to each board, and if the other links are still good, links straight to either the page or directly to the pdf file with the manual for each board.

I am pretty sure I am remembering them right, and if so, the Tyan Thunders are the only ones with scsi.
But, if your interested, the Gigabyte does have 1 with onboard IDE RAID.

[cmcquistion]

Another thing you may want to consider is that SCSI is probably overkill for a web server, unless it is doing database work, or something.

With File Servers, SCSI is good because of the quick seek times and intelligent I/O. For web servers, however, quicker seek times rarely make any difference (unless it is running database queries, or something.) Web servers don't have the bandwidth of a File server. You are transmitting over the web, which will add lots of latency, therefore a slightly faster hard drive system won't make too much difference. With most web servers, I think the data is primarily kept in memory, so lots of memory is probably where you should really invest. (within reason, of course. If you have a website that is 100 MB, then you don't need 4 GB of memory.)

Of course, you could make a case for going with SCSI because of the longer warranty and supposedly higher quality of SCSI drives, but I just wanted to give you something else to consider.

[Mr.Guvernment]

well some background

currently we have a PIII 933 / 512pc133/ 80g 7200RPM drive


this iks out main web server (in office) and is also a netop connecvtion for na accountant.

as it is - we have to reboot it at least 2 or 3 times a day it is crawling so much.


I decided today - i am just going to get an xp2200 (the palce had not 2400 or 2500 in stock) Costa rica is very limited and takes weeks to get anything in!


So, in the end we will have a


AMD 2200+XP - 1.8ghz? - which i figure i can o/c to @ least 2ghz maybeeee
512 pc3200
Asus A7V8X
80g WD 8mb drive

to give you an idae of prices - all the above will run me about $500 - that is how pricey things are in costa rica :(


this should do it - the site we use is all php - but the database end is on a dell poweredge pIII 733 with 142g (76x2) Ultra SCSI 320 drives - we are updating it to i'ts max @ 2 x 1g PIII - so over all these too improvement should do us nicely!