Wow . . . First time I've posted a reply to a thread since they upgraded . . . a hair different
Anyway, I would agree that it's most likely not a processor bottleneck, so the 242s ought to be more than enough. For some reason, I doubt that it's a
lack of RAM, as somebody said above, but lack of memory
bandwidth. PC2100 is slow enough as it is, but without a dual channel interface, it just doesn't have a chance . . . 875 kicks the NForce2 in bandwidth by quite a margin, last time I checked, and that's in dual channel. Now that you can get Xeons on an 875 chipset, it makes the 760 chipset look still more dated.
Processor-wise, I think that Xeons would certainly perform the job just as well, and if price cuts are indeed substantial with the introduction of Naconas, they might be even more appealing. But at the same time, the advent of Naconas basically opens the coffin for Prestonias . . . A 240 really doesn't compete all that well with a 2.4 Xeon, so I'd say that in terms of performance alone, a 2.4 Xeon and a 242 are about even. So, in my mind, unless price cuts are huge and price is a deciding factor, there's no reason to go with a Xeon, since there's clearly not much of an upgrade path. With Opterons, you get at the very least a few speed bumps, x86-64, and perhaps dual core (fingers crossed).
I think RAID, in any form, ought to be as simple as possible. Most of the data needed is going to be in RAM (unless somebody intends to let it serve data on the side), so having a huge RAID array seems sorta' silly. A 10k RPM drive ought to be enough on its own for read, writes, and latency, but I can see the point in the redundancy of RAID1. SCSI seems like a waste, and RAID5 even more.
In terms of the MSI board without NUMA, there is only a slight difference in memory scores at the moment, with NUMA boards winning by a hair (I think . . . it's been quite a while since I checked), but if you switch to x86-64 in the future, you'll pick up quite a gain. If you're counting x86-64 as a pro, then I think you ought to make use of it when you can, and if this has as long a life-cycle as you intend it to, you might well need it later on. Also, don't forget the ability to hold twice the RAM in NUMA boards. Games suck a lot of RAM, and that's only going to get worse . . . In two or three years, how will 4GB of RAM hold up to modern games?
So I think a NUMA board with 242s, 2GB of RAM (4 if you don't want to replace existing RAM in an upgrade), and a single Raptor (or two Raptors in RAID1) is a great platform. It's not too spendy, it's got a long life ahead of it, and it eradicates your memory bottleneck. Only trouble will be if AMD switches to DDR2 before it adds dual cores . . . then you'll need to replace the whole rig . . .
Z
