Dual Core system

[Mike Fishcake]

I need a dual core system to replace a dual CPU system we have that's faulty.

I'm not bothered about the performance, the cheaper the better really, I just need a dual core system for testing purposes. As long as it beats 2x athlon MP 2200 CPUs.

Been having a look at the P4 D 820 CPUs, and I need to know whether I can get a motherboard with DDR rather than DDR2 RAM, as we already have the RAM and I don't really want to buy more. Athlon X2 is an option, but the 4200 is more expensive than the P4D820.

[Mike Fishcake]

Quick urgent question - is a P4 D 820 going to run ok with PC4200 (533) DDR?

or do i need 667?

[Mike Fishcake]

Doesnt matter - sorted now

[Mike Fishcake]

MNNNAARRRRGHH

This is proving to be a pain in the &^$%%^$£$()*&$ (*%!!

At the moment, I have in the system

Tyan dual athlon MP motheboard
one working MP 2200
one faulty MP2200
3 different SCSI cards of various types, handling an incredibly large amount of HDDs.
1 GB LAN PCI card
1 AGP card
4 IDE Hard drives
1GB DDR RAM.

I was going to replace it with a P4 D 820, but I can't get a board that will help me support that. None of the suitable boards I can see have 2 IDE ports. I can only find one motherboard - Supermicro PDSLE - with 4 PCI slots, that of course doesn't have 2 IDE ports. AN option is to put a PCI controller card in there. Oh, wait, no PCI slots left!

Aha! The board has onboard GB LAN.

Did I mention that the sytem will be running a beta version of the FreeBSD OS?

*gibber*

I need all the SCSI cards. I need 4 IDE disks. I need a dual core system. Please help me :-S

[Dougal]

If its just for testing, why not ebay and find a 2nd hand MP?

If you do really want to upgrade the Abit k8t800 looks like it will do what you need.

5 PCI slots, 2 IDE channels (aswell as sata so you can convert a couple of IDE drives to SATA for £20 per HDD), aswell as an AGP.

[Mike Fishcake]

Dougal, unfortunately it's for a university, and we can't buy stuff off ebay, unless of course they're a legit company diong so. I've looked though :-S. My job would be a hell of a lot easier if our admin department had paypal :-D

Thanks for the mobo recommendation anyway!

Cheers

[Rave]

Basically every half decent motherboard nowadays has onboard Gigabit LAN. So, with that in mind, it looks like this gigabyte board might do you?

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=219720

It has onboard graphics too, if you were planning on buying a seperate PCI-Express graphics card you could go with a board based on the 945P chipset instead. As far as I know nobody plans to offer 945/955 chipset boards with DDR1 support (dunno if that's even possible) but you can get a gig of DDR2 for under £60 now so that's not a disaster. Similarly nobody is likely to offer a board with an AGP slot (well someone like ECS might but it'll likely be a kludge).

[Mike Fishcake]

Onboard graphics would be good, seeing as it's only a server. Assuming the guy's OS can cope with the stuff that's on there, that would be great. Gigabyte are usually my second choice mobo manufacurer anyway :-)

Cheers Rave!

[arthurleung]

You'll need a PCIe SCSI RAID card (I assume you put your old SCSI cards on PCI64/33) Which is EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE. For that price you could have got a Dual Opteron with PCI-X (or even PCI-X+PCIe).

Memory of Dual Opteron is more expensive, but gives more headroom for expanding.
You'll be locked into AGP+PCI or PCIe+PCI if you're using X2. You'll need new SCSI card or have possibly severely degraded storage performance (Down from 533MBytes/s to 133Mbytes/s)

You can only get PCIe+PCI-X or AGP+PCI-X only. You can't get both. So you have to decide if you want to get a new graphics (or you can use the onboard and AGP/PCIe don't matter to you.)

And Beware if you're going to get a new SCSI card. You may(very likely) need to REBUILD your WHOLE ARRAY if you're moving your RAID (If you're running one now)

[Rave]

NP.

[Mike Fishcake]

arthur - i'm confused... why can't i use the existing scsi cards in that board?

[Mike Fishcake]

FWIW, the SCSI cards are

- adaptec 29160 (66MHZ i know, but he says he's not bothered if it runs in 33mhz)
- adaptec 2940
(get ready for this) - symbios logic 5eC875J (differential scsi)

So they're not hardware RAID.

It makes no sense, I know. Good job it's not a critical system

[arthurleung]

arthur - i'm confused... why can't i use the existing scsi cards in that board?

You cards use a PCI64/66 Interface (It is unlikely you're not) Which is a pretty long slot. You should see a few long slots (PCI64) in your system, and a few short slots (PCI32).

PCI64/66Mhz have a maximum transfer rate of 533MB/s, while PCI32/33Mhz (short one) have a maximum transfer rate of 133MB/s.

I didn't say you can't. I believe you're using the cards in the long slots now. If you use the existing card, ALL the cards will slow down to PCI32/33Mhz, i.e. 133MB/s max. For example, if you had been able to send at 150MB/s (150MB/s out, 150MB/s in + overhead = approx 300MB/s) from an array/disk on card1 to an array/disk on card2. On the new S939/I945/I955 board you can only do 60MB/s (60M out 60M in + overhead = approx 133MB/s).

If some programs do need a lot of read/write, that will have a pretty large impact on your system performance. PCIe 2x, is about the same speed as a PCI64/66Mhz slot. PCIe RAID cards use PCIe4x/8x slots so they're generally faster.


Non-server boards DOES NOT have PCI64/66Mhz or higher ports. PCI64/66 cards DOES NOT fit into a PCIe slot

[Rave]

If the cards aren't hardware raid then he's not really going to lose much if any performance running them in a standard PCI slot.

[arthurleung]

If the cards aren't hardware raid then he's not really going to lose much if any performance running them in a standard PCI slot.

True Though I had a hard time moving files across HDDs since PCI is so slow. On my KT600 platform my max speed is 262MB/s read (98MB/s from PCI ATA card, 106MB/s from Onboard PATA and 58MB/s from SATA (1 drive only)

I was in a hurry checking for bad sectors, and sorting out the files spreaded across the HDDs.

[Mike Fishcake]

arthur - cheers for the info, but this current system is a little more haphazard than you're giving us credit for