Which mobos to go for - differences between

  • Thread starter Thread starter NickC
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NickC

Actually got two choices to make one for the Server and the other for the
workstations. Any opinions on the differences between these:

Server: Opteron 140 on either a SK8N or SK8V but which? SK8V has the
advantage of extra SATA ports but it is only going to have two drives
(mirrored) anyway, SK8N has two network ports which saves buying a network
card.

Workstations: XP 2800 Barton on either a A7V880 or a A7B8X-E deluxe, which
is best as a network workstation? A7V880 has no Firewire (probably never
going to use anyway) and is a bit short on 3pin fan connectors (2 only) but
the A7N8X-E is cluttered with unwanted extras like WiFi, extra network
connection and go-faster sound.

Any opinions on which boards I shoul go for?

Cheers,
Nick
 
Server: Opteron 140 on either a SK8N or SK8V but which? SK8V has the
advantage of extra SATA ports but it is only going to have two drives
(mirrored) anyway, SK8N has two network ports which saves buying a network
card.
Click to expand...

You can purchase a ASUS PC-DL Deluxe, dual Xeon, 2GB of RAM, and install
4 SATA (using the onboard Intel or Promise RAID controllers) and still
use 2 more IDE devices if you want. all of this for about $2000 USD.

The boards you spec'd look very nice, but I can't see where they've been
available for a long time. When it comes to servers, if you want
stability, you never pick something that's new to the market.

I've installed about 12 of the PC-DL with Dual Xeon's and even added in
a Promise SX6000 RAID card with 6 x 250GB IDE drives (hot swappable) and
2 x 80GB for the OS on the SATA channels, to provide small servers with
over 1TB of data space available for customers.

If all you want is a mirror for the OS, then use the Promise SATA RAID
controller onboard. Install 2 x 250GB SATA and then create two
partitions, one of 12~16GB for the OS and the remainder for the data
partition.

You didn't mention what Server OS you were going to run, but I'm
assuming some Windows based OS from your workstation spec, and the PC-DL
does great on Windows 2000 and Windows 2003.

As for Dual Network ports - you can get Gig ethernet cards for under $50
at most places, so that's not a real issue.

Notice, I didn't say a word about them being AMD's, this post has
nothing to do with the AMD/Intel war.
 
Actually got two choices to make one for the Server and the other for the
workstations. Any opinions on the differences between these:

Server: Opteron 140 on either a SK8N or SK8V but which? SK8V has the
advantage of extra SATA ports but it is only going to have two drives
(mirrored) anyway, SK8N has two network ports which saves buying a network
card.
Click to expand...

I have some issues with my SK8V running with Athlon 64 FX. In general,
I will say that Nvidia has a better chipset than VIA for the
AMD64-plattform. I have problems with system lagging with some heavy
HDD-usage, and bad multitasking-performance when e.g. moving huge
amount of data from one HDD to another.
Workstations: XP 2800 Barton on either a A7V880 or a A7B8X-E deluxe, which
is best as a network workstation? A7V880 has no Firewire (probably never
going to use anyway) and is a bit short on 3pin fan connectors (2 only) but
the A7N8X-E is cluttered with unwanted extras like WiFi, extra network
connection and go-faster sound.

Any opinions on which boards I shoul go for?
Click to expand...

Also for the Socket A-plattform my recommendation will be a
Nvidia-based board.

On the A7V880 you have two 3-pin connectors in addition to one for
CPU. I guess you really must have a powerful videoboard and quite many
HDDs before more than two case-fans is needed. And if you need more,
you can connect them to the PSU directly. Can monitor them, but...

You also have the Asus A7N8X-X, which is a bit cheaper than the
-E-version of the nf2-based Asus-board. But I don't think Asus have
any nForce2-boards with the new southbridge with integrated Serial
ATA-support -- Abit has this. Not sure about others. As far as I can
see, the standard A7N8X-E Deluxe don't have WiFi -- it has a slot for
a special solution yes, but no direct WLAN-support. As for the two
integrated NICs on this board -- the Nvidia-NIC is bad... but anyway,
at least here in Norway there don't seem to be too much
price-difference between a board with a lot of features and the boards
with less features....
 
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