Wow - you surely do type fast :-)
Anyway, I was only half serious with that answer - anything less than a Tyan
S2882 would be a waste when using dual core chips, especially if you figure
out the cost difference in the board in comparison to the cost of the CPUs.
But give me some credit - after all it was you who threw out the $300 price
mark and besides that, the original poster said he had no real IO
requirements.
On Friday 24 June 2005 00:48, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-06-23 at 23:06 -0400, Peter Arremann wrote:
> > The board: Asus K8N-DL
> > http://www.asus.com.tw/products.aspx?l1=9&l2=39&l3=174&model=456&modelmen
> >u=1
>
> Um, that's _not_ a server board at all. That's a workstation board with
> virtually no I/O. It's designed for pure computational need and _no_
> I/O at all. That's not me being "anal" -- I mean, there is _no_ I/O on
> that thing!
Yep :-)
>
> You've got the PCIe x16 for video, and a PCIe x1 for maybe an audio, NIC
> or low-end storage card. Unless you get a PCIe x4 or x8 storage card
> and put it in that PCIe x16 slot, you're going to be sharing _all_ I/O
> on a legacy, 133MBps PCI slot.
And that would be a smart thing to do if you got stuck with a board like
that... In a server you waste the PCIe slot for graphics - put an ancient 8MB
ati rage in there and you're set.
> And it would be nice to have a server NIC that is connected via PCI-X,
> and not a "client" designed NIC that is in the nForce4 chipset.
>
> You might as well have an old, 100MHz Pentium processor mainboard. I'm
> dead serious here, the 100MHz Pentium would have no trouble handling the
> legacy PCI interconnect that system is giving you. It is a
> _workstation_ mainboard (and assumes your workstation doesn't need much
> I/O ;-).
You keep repeating that word workstation a lot... What exactly is the
difference between a workstation and a server? The high end is easy... Server
- domainable, cell board based with redundant power grid and and and... but
the lower you go, the more similar they become... First you loose the
redundant power grids, then the cell board based approach... Next goes the
blacklisting of components and finally somewhere you lost your service
processor.. What's left is a Sun 420R server... oops - the Ultra-80
workstation I mean... Oh darn - except the case, they are the same...
Well, maybe sun doesn't know any better.. I bet HP does... unless the J6xxx
workstations and the Ax00 servers are the same too... Darn... but the J6750s
make excellent rackmountable workstations :-) IBM? low end P5 p5[25]0 - they
don't even bother calling it two different models - you can just get it
configured as server or workstation...
(btw, not defending that asus board with this - that board really is very
limited in IO)
> This is _not_ me being "anal." I install _low-cost_ networks all-the-
> time. I do it on a dime. And this board for $270 is _not_ what you
> want in a server. Trust me on this! Splurge $20-50 more and get
> something with at least an AMD8131.
Completely agreed - spend the extra money if you want to build a serious
server...
Peter.
