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IWILL vs ASUS vs SUPERMICRO

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radadman

Member
Joined
Oct 15, 2001
Can't decide on which mobo would be best as a entry level web server. The most bang for the buck is what i'm after.
1 must be dual tualatin
2 must have scsi either onboard or a separate card
3 would like to have ddr instead of sdram
4 don't care about audio or video
5 of course it must be a screamer

1st choice: Iwill dvd266u-rn dual w/ddr

2nd choice: Asus ASCUV4X-DLS w/sdram & onboard scsi160

3rd choice: Supermicro SUPER P3TDDR w/sdram & onboard dual scsi160 & dual 10/100 lans

both 1 & 2 are overclockable, 3 is not
both 2 & 3 have onboard scsi160, 1 does not
1 has ddr, 2 & 3 have sdram

I'm sure the iwill board has the best performance and is the cheapest but I would have to get a separate scsi card for around $200. Asus seems the most for the money. Supermicro has the most features but can't OC.

Also since I never built a scsi PC, I would like to know if the scsi bus would be imune to OCing the fsb? I mean does the scsi bus run at the same speed reguardless of the fsb speed?
 
Is this going to be your web server? I'm wondering cuz you'd want reliability over speed. And no, onboard scsi is not "immune" to FSB O/C. It's hard for me to choose cuz they all have a VIA chipset in there. But I'm mad crazy biased against VIA.

Also, because PIII's are limited by FSB, going DDR would give veryvery little gains in performance. if you benched it, you'd see mayb up to 5% increase, in real world, hardly noticable. I say this because unless you stocked up on DDR, it's getting more expensive lately. SD-Ram is also tried and true. Can't go wrong w/ that.
 
well ddr has been shot down for PIIIS but for duallies wouldnt it wbe a lot better? seeing as there are two cpus using the same ram so you have double the bandwtih?.....Look at the ASUS TUA266 that one has an ALi chipset...
 
well ddr has been shot down for PIIIS but for duallies wouldnt it wbe a lot better? seeing as there are two cpus using the same ram so you have double the bandwtih?.....

it don't work out that way, due to the fact that both CPUs have to share the same SDR FSB. AMD chips get a decent boost with DDR memory thanks to their DDR EV6 front side bus...also I believe AMD duallies each get their own FSB to run on...I could be wrong.


I'd say go for the Asus personally. I've used their stuff in the past and it worked just fine. Also, for a server I'd much rather have faster disk drives than faster memory.
 
Warning: I'm about to blather on something I remember reading months ago=)

As far as I remember PIII's share the same bus. Duals running at 100FSB, each proc will take 50FSB each. At 133FSB each proc will run at ~66FSB. It's the way the PIII bus was designed.

AMD procs on the other hand go at their full FSB speed. Duals at 100FSB will go 100FSB each. Tho', since AMD is new to the game, they haven't quite implements SMP very well yet..so it doesn't perform as well as it should.

The extra bandwidth from DDR doesn't matter as the PIII's are limited by FSB speed. It's also a reason why you'll never see 2X the speed from duals.

Me thinks thats how it goes=)
 
DDR + PIII is not so much better than SDRAM + PIII because there is a big bottleneck in the memory data transfer header, as has been said. But in a dual system is a little better used as the two CPU are not always using the header at the same time. I personally bought an Iwill DVD266u-RN as it has a RAID chip. If you are going to use it a server and not as a workstation you really don't need such a high transfer rate from the HD to the CPU. And using stripping you'll have a very fast system.

My system (currently being shipping) as for now:

Iwill DVD266u-RN
2 256 Mb Mushkin 2400 DDR sticks
2 850E PIII
2 HD (2 20 or 40 GB Seagate Barracuda or 40 GB Western Digital)

If you are going to buy a new mobo just be sure you are purchasing one that supports the PIII-S chips, as that will be your only upgrade available in the future.
 
Thanks for the replies! I had no idea that smp w/PIII's split the bus speed like you guys explained.

Mictlan said:
If you are going to use it a server and not as a workstation you really don't need such a high transfer rate from the HD to the CPU.

Monster of rock said:
Also, for a server I'd much rather have faster disk drives than faster memory.

I always thought that a faster disk (scsi) was more necessary for a server than a workstation. Which is it?

Today I was told that the server may be demoted to a photoshop workstation before next summer. So the Iwill really seems hard to beat as a all around machine. Plus we can move the scsi to the new server when its built.
 
The Iwill is a good choice.....If you go to www.storagereview.com you can see that today fast Ultra ATA 100 IDE HD are as fast as some of the leading SCSI HD. If you throw an stripping array.....you can have a huge transfer rate from an IDE HD (and with some money saved).....
 
I always thought that a faster disk (scsi) was more necessary for a server than a workstation. Which is it?

The whole idea of a server is to share multiple file simultaenously with multiple users...past a certain point, the CPU/FSB/etc will get bogged down waiting for the HD to read data to a client. If you only have like 4 clients on the server, that'll never happen unless all 4 folks try to grab the same file at the same time, but in that case why are you using a dedicated server anyway? P2P would work fine.

When I think server, I think of a Linux box squatting in a corner just serving data to at least a dozen clients...any less and it's not worth the $$$ to build one.
 
Mictlan,
Thanks for the tip to storagereview.com IDE raid will do just fine for now and save lots of bucks. As Goober says "I'll do it Andy!"

I think Iwill wins the mobo race too! Hey its not my money and/or server, although I will take pride in this machine no doubt. One could spent more $ on a pre-made dell or similar piece of crap, then what this system will cost.

Thanks much for all the help! And Mictlan post your sandra scores when you get your machine in.

Here's the shopping list:
Mobo - IWILL DVD266u-RN
CPU - 2 Intel PIII Tualatin 1.13GHz Server chip 512k
DRIVE - 2 IBM Ultra100 IDE, 7,200rpm, 40G each, raid stripe zero
MEMORY - 2 Kingmax 256MB 32x64, PC2400 DDR TinyBGA, CAS2
PWR - Enermax EG465P
 
First off a dual system doesn't "split" the FSB speed as has been suggested. I think what some were trying to say was that in a dual (or more) processor system both processors share the available memory bandwidth. This is true whether we're talking about Intel of the new AMD dual processor systems. Before anyone goes to saying the AMD systems don't have to share bandwidth let me say that is just pure hogwash. While the AMD 760MP systems may have a separate bus connecting each CPU to the northbridge they still have to share a common bus to the memory from the northbridge which then becomes the bottleneck. So, AMDs supposedly "superior point-to-point bus" is all hype and gimmick and designed to sound good to people who know no better. Anyway, if you have a dual CPU system both processors FSB will still run at what they would in a single configuration. It's not halved as you may mistakenly assume reading some of the earlier comments. Both CPUs do however have to share memory bandwidth. So, memory bandwidth may become more important in an SMP system.

For a server, one thing that's important is stability. If you must absolutely go with a Tualatin system then you might want to look at supermicros website and look at some of their Serverworks chipset based boards. I believe the Serverworks chipsets support Tualatin and are probably about the only alternative your gonna find to VIA. My personal opinion is that Via is a crap and I know many others who share that opinion. Via may be okay for desktop systems that are for gaming and surfing the net, but I think most people who build servers would cringe at the thought of a server based on a Via chipset. Anyway, Serverworks is known to be a manufacturer of high quality stable chipsets for use in servers.

As for IDE raid, I think you may be dissappointed with it in a server. IDE raid is mainly good for raid 0 and only gives you increased transfer rates. When your working with large sequentially accessed files, like media files, then transfer rate is most important. However, in a server often times you need fast access time and it is likely more important than high transfer rate because you have lots of users acessing lots of smaller files or pieces of smaller files which are scattered across the harddrive. In a case like that transfer rate is less important and fast acess time or latency becomes more of an issue as most of the time required to retrieve the data is not spent actually transfering the data but instead either waiting for the data on the platter to rotate around to the read/write head or waiting for the read/write head to be positioned over the data. In those cases a high RPM drive with a quick acess time may be your best bet. You know what that means, 15K RPM SCSI. IDE raid, on the other hand is good for working with Video and large image files and such as that but probably not that great in a server.

As for motherboard manufacturers, I recommend Supermicro. They are known for high quality motherboards that are rock solid stable. They usually don't have many or any overclocking options, but if your building a server that shouldn't be an issue.
 
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Very infomative!
Actually here are the options I have been exploring:

Mobo - IWILL DVD266u-RN, Dual CPU PIII 370, Dual RAID, Dual ATA100, 10/100Lan, Audio5.1 , VIA 266t
CPU - 1 Intel PIII Tualatin 1.13GHz Server chip 256k
HSF - Copper Gladiator with delta fan
DRIVE - 2 IBM Ultra100 IDE, 7,200rpm, 40G each, raid stripe zero array 80G
MEMORY - 2 Kingmax 256MB 32x64, PC2400 DDR TinyBGA, CAS2, 300MHz, 184pin memory DIMM
VIDEO - generic agp
CDrom - generic 52x
CASE - Full tower case 5-5” bays, 5-3” bays
PWR - Enermax EG365P-VE ATX PS 300W (Peak 350W) PS ATX 2.03

Mobo - IWILL DVD266u-RN, Dual CPU PIII 370, Dual RAID, Dual ATA100, 10/100Lan, Audio5.1 , VIA 266t
CPU - 2 Intel PIII Tualatin 1.13GHz Server chip 256k
HSF - Copper Gladiator with delta fan
DRIVE - IBM Ultra160 SCSI, 10,000rpm, 18G
CONTROLLER - SCSI 160 ADAPTEC 29160
MEMORY - Kingmax 256MB 32x64, PC2700 DDR TinyBGA, CAS2, 333MHz, 184pin memory DIMM
VIDEO - generic agp
CDrom - generic 52x
CASE - Full tower case 5-5” bays, 5-3” bays
PWR - Enermax EG465P-VE ATX PS 400W (Peak 450W) PS ATX 2.03

Mobo - IWILL DVD266u-RN, Dual CPU PIII 370, Dual RAID, Dual ATA100, 10/100Lan, Audio5.1 , VIA 266t
CPU - 2 Intel PIII Tualatin 1.26GHz Server chip 512k
HSF - Copper Gladiator with YStech fan
DRIVE - IBM Ultra160 SCSI, 10,000rpm, 18G
CONTROLLER - SCSI 160 ADAPTEC
MEMORY - Kingmax 256MB 32x64, PC2700 DDR TinyBGA, CAS2, 333MHz, 184pin memory DIMM
VIDEO - generic agp
CDrom - generic 52x
CASE - Full tower case 5-5” bays, 5-3” bays
PWR - Enermax EG465P-VE ATX PS 400W (Peak 450W) PS ATX 2.03

Mobo - SUPERMICRO P3TDDR, onboard - Dual 100/10 Lan, Dual SCSI 160, Dual RAID, Audio5.1 (not OC)
CPU - 2 Intel PIII Tualatin 1.26GHz Server chip 512k
HSF - Copper Gladiator with YStech fan
DRIVE - IBM Ultra160 SCSI, 10,000rpm, 18G
MEMORY - Kingmax 256MB 32x64, PC2700 DDR TinyBGA, CAS2, 333MHz, 184pin memory DIMM
CDrom - generic 52x
CASE - Full tower case 5-5” bays, 5-3” bays
PWR - Enermax EG651P-VE ATX PS 530W (Peak 650W) PS ATX 2.03

Mobo -TYAN THUNDER Dual CPU Athlon MP DDR, onboard - Dual 100/10 Lan, Dual SCSI 160, video
CPU - 2 ATHLON MP 1700MHz
HSF - Copper Gladiator with YStech fan
DRIVE - IBM Ultra160 SCSI, 10,000rpm, 18G
MEMORY - Kingmax 256MB 32x64, PC2700 DDR TinyBGA, CAS2, 333MHz, 184pin memory DIMM
CDrom - generic 52x
CASE - Full tower case 5-5” bays, 5-3” bays
PWR - Enermax EG651P-VE ATX PS 530W (Peak 650W) PS ATX 2.03
 
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If I had the money I would go straight into the 1.26 Chip. They are the flagship now and the last time I saw they are $20 more expensive than the 1.13.

As for the cooling, I don't think you need a Delta screamer to cool this babies, a less radical solution could be used.

If you want to go AMD, I would wait until Asus gets tested.....ALso other mobo makers will start to get their own MP board and that will drive the price down.
 
Mictlan,
I really got to thanks you for turing me on to storagereview.com, what a great site! Yea two WD1000bb's w/8m in a striped 0 array WOW! I had no idea that ide could even come close competing with scsi. Thanks much!
 
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