The day is near that I'm purchasing a dual proc. motherboard. Reason for dual proc. is that I have a 39160 64 bit Seagate SCSI board that I want to get the most of.FWIW, I have been very happy with a Tyan 2466N-4M (Tiger MPX) Dual Athlon motherboard. The MB has a pair of 64bit, 66MHz PCI slots that can make a big difference in disk I/O. It has been very stable and absent some problems getting lm_sensors to work (but that isn't a Shrike issue, as I had the same problems under 7.3), it has been a real work horse. I am running a pair of MP-2000+ processors, 1GB of registered ECC RAM and a software RAID 5 implementation using EIDE disks. Depending on your workload mix, a dual Athlon should be a very good solution (particularly if you do much floating point work). About the only time I might consider a P4 and RIMM would be if I were doing a lot of multi-media work and the programs took advantage of the instruction set extensions in the P4. However, the P4/RAMBUS combination will be significantly more expensive.
I'm looking at buying a Tyan Tiger motherboard with dual AMD processers. Can anyone recommend if this will be an incompatible purchase with RH9? Would I be better off getting an INTEL motherboard and proc setup? I don't own any INTEL CPU's. I've been using strictly AMD for the last 10+ years but with this purchase I want a machine that will honk.
Any comments or suggestions welcome.
BTW, if you want to build a system with a pair of Athlon processors, you ought to be very careful about your PSU. My recommendation would be an Antec TruePower 430W (or better) or a PC Power and Cooling unit (400W+), but the later will cost considerably more. One additional thought, you might want to check around and see when (or if) there is going to be an MP processor using the Barton core. I suspect that using a pair of processors with Barton cores, considering the expanded cache and narrower line geometry, could be a winner both from a performance and a thermal management standpoint.
HTH
Paul
