Please help me choose Memory for AMD64

  • Thread starter Thread starter Synapse Syndrome
  • Start date Start date
The Asus boards do take ECC memory, but only un-buffered. Should I choose
this? I can only find registered ECC RAM.

ss.
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Crucial has unbuffered ECC 512M DIMMs. However for the kind of workload
that you are talking about I'd get a dual Opteron boards. Opterons use
registered ECC RAM.
 
In article news: said:
The VIA drivers for Linux have been around for some time and
mostly just need a little tweaking when a new chipset comes out.
The nForce drivers are much newer and there were stability
problems reported with nForce 2, but maybe that's all fixed now.
Click to expand...

Hmm. Thanks for that. I'll keep on reading.
I'm not sure whether all the features of either board are
supported with free drivers. NVidia are better at providing
closed drivers, but closed drivers of any sort, especially if
your data integrity's relying on them, are preferably avoided.
I do see that the kernel now has VIA SATA support, but I don't
see any for nForce.
Click to expand...

I run Gentoo, so I'd definitely prefer to see sourcecode
distribution of drivers.

VIA don't seem terribly good at providing source - the MPEG
acceleration hardware in the M10000 board has support from VIA in
the form of binary drivers for various distros, but what source
drivers are available are all reverse-engineered jobbies.

I can't see any good reason why VIA should want not to distribute
their drivers as source -- it's not as though their competitors are
suddenly going to start selling rival drivers for features supported
only be VIA hardware!
Do the latest nForce boards have SATA integrated into the
Southbridge, or do VIA still have the lead there? That's another
potential issue.
Click to expand...

TBH I can't see the point of SATA. It's data bus is faster than the
hardware by even more than PATA-100 (or 133), it's wiring is a bit
neater, its connectors are a bit flaky-looking - where's the
advantage? When disks appear that can actually deliver a sustained
150MB/s I'll look again.

Cheers,
Daniel.
 
In <[email protected]>,
Daniel James said:
Hmm. Thanks for that. I'll keep on reading.


I run Gentoo, so I'd definitely prefer to see sourcecode
distribution of drivers.
Click to expand...

Actually, when looking at HOWTOs for getting tricky hardware to work,
I've often come across guides specifically for Gentoo, to a greater
extent than Red Hat or Debian (my preference). There's definitely a
Gentto guide for the VIA MPEG decoder you mentioned, for example.
I can't see any good reason why VIA should want not to distribute
their drivers as source -- it's not as though their competitors are
suddenly going to start selling rival drivers for features supported
only be VIA hardware!
Click to expand...

Much the same applies to nVidia really though. The free VIA drivers
mostly have the advantage of having a more mature base.
TBH I can't see the point of SATA. It's data bus is faster than the
hardware by even more than PATA-100 (or 133), it's wiring is a bit
neater, its connectors are a bit flaky-looking - where's the
advantage? When disks appear that can actually deliver a sustained
150MB/s I'll look again.
Click to expand...

Good point. It is hot-pluggable AFAIK, but to the average person I don't
think that's terribly useful. I've never understood why so many
motherboards have RAID support either.
 
Actually, when looking at HOWTOs for getting tricky hardware to work,
I've often come across guides specifically for Gentoo, to a greater
extent than Red Hat or Debian (my preference). There's definitely a
Gentto guide for the VIA MPEG decoder you mentioned, for example.
Click to expand...

Yes. I suppose it's because Gentoo is (primarily) a sourcecode distro
that it attracts so many coders and tinkerers, and so has very good
peer support for things like this.

As I said, though, the VIA MPEG support for Gentoo is from people
who've reverse-engineered VIA's binary drivers for other distros to see
how they work. There is no sourcecode distribution of those drivers
from VIA themselves, which is a great pity.
I've never understood why so many motherboards have RAID support
either.
Click to expand...

RAID is handy. In mirroring mode it gives a degree of protection from
data loss and in striping mode it gives a boost in speed (and capacity,
though big disks are getting cheaper all the time so that's not as
important as it once was). I suppose the reason it's becoming so common
is that the chipsets are relatively cheap (to buy and to design around)
so why not?

Cheers,
Daniel.
 
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