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The machine is a dual Opteron 240, 2 GB of DDR333 and two 15K SCSI-drives controlled by the on-board 133 MHz PCI-X U320 controller.

Of course, 754 is being deprecated and all that, but I thought I'd put a word in for what I'd buy... if it weren't so damn expensive. *sigh* Will we ever have dual athlon64 goodness?

I'd like to see one based on this bad boy.

4 gigE ports, each on it's own PCI-X controller. Between the two Xeons and whatever amount of memory you through at it, one of these could *easily* handle a great deal of BGP sessions, load-balancing, failover, as well as VPN and encryption.

With a board like that, a couple of Xeons, and a gig of memory, these could out-perform some very, very expensive commercial routers.

steve

ATi has recently turned to this practice as well. You can get ATi-based cards ("Powered by ATi") from Asus, Tyan, and a variety of others.

I know you probably don't consider it retail, but boards that support dual Opterons are already out there.

What are you talking about? Dual Opteron boards have been out since pretty much Day 1 of the Opteron's release.

A few examples:
Tyan Thunder K8W
MSI K8D Master-F
Rioworks HDAMC

Actually, Tyan has not one, but five 64 bit motherboards available.

ISA 4 Ever, foo! If that's too old for you, try: P4 ISA Power!

Just try running Vegas Video, or the WM9 codec, or most any recent game or serious windows-only multimedia app in either of those emulators and you'll see why they are not options for a large majority of people.

Meanwhile, perhaps you'd look at the Tyan Thunder K8W which can support 16GB of RAM. Plus it has serious I/O in the form of 2 PCI-X 133MHz and 2 PCI-X 100Mhz slots.

Since the poster's link was to the front page rather than the product page, you probably went searching and found the K8S, which has no AGP slot.

What the poster was referring to was the K8W, which does indeed have an AGP 8x/Pro slot. No DDR400+ memory support, but that stuff's hard to find in ECC, damned expensive, and dual memory banks give it a much bigger edge in speed over single-bank designs anyway.

Since the poster's link was to the front page rather than the product page, you probably went searching and found the K8S, which has no AGP slot.

What the poster was referring to was the K8W, which does indeed have an AGP 8x/Pro slot. No DDR400+ memory support, but that stuff's hard to find in ECC, damned expensive, and dual memory banks give it a much bigger edge in speed over single-bank designs anyway.

Let's commence with our course, reading specs 101:
1. find the datasheet
2. press CTRL-F and search for AGP
3. press CTRL-F and search for ATX

Ad 3.
And please don't start debating wether extended ATX is ATX. ATX has very specific size and power contraints and this board fits neither.

Yup, that would do it for me.

What are you talking about??? Did you even view the link? This board (the s2880) has AGP and is ATX form factor. True, this maybe more server oriented with the oboard graphics card, but I see no reason (other than price, maybe) why this can't be a desktop/workstation mobo.

go for this the s2885 from tyan. It has PCI-X, AGP, SATA, GBe, and hold 16GB RAM... Can't lose.

Yes except that with Tyan's s2885 you can have up to 16GB RAM, and it has AGP as well, so you can throw in a professional graphics card and really slam through renders or play some good games. Of course the board is $500, and 8GB will run you 2600 from crucial.com, and then you still need the rest of the machine...

It ain't cheap, but it sure would be a lot of fun to play with...ah that is it would increase my productivity...

The via board hinders the opteron. Instead of utilizing both on-chip memory controllers, it only uses one. You can see better results if you added a second set of memory banks for the second opteron to use.

There are more dual boards also including Tyans Thuder K8W. Rumor has it that nvidia will be coming out with a nforce chipset that will support dual opterons also.

Benchmarks
246 Benchmark
Overclocked 246

Whatever, guy. I have an AT case with an AT motherboard with a Pentium III 1000 MHz. AGP video card too. This sucker can run Quake3 just fine. No modifications to case, motherboard, CPU, or anything.

First thing is that all E7505-based boards are basically the same on the surface due to the basic features of the chipset. They all have dual processor support, support for dual channel DDR, and support for PCI-X up to 133MHz (to name a few). Once a manufacturer gets their hands on the board though, features can be added or it can simply be left as is.

The PCI-X controller used in almost all of the E750x workstation/server boards is really expensive and adds to the complexity of the board layout and design. It seems that Tyan decided to forgo that chip in order to keep the cost of the board down while making up for it by adding Serial ATA (but no FireWire like it's larger Thunder i7505 brother).

One board that I would like to have seen reviewed is the Supermicro X5DAL (with or without Serial ATA RAID) as it does include PCI-X slots, but it is also a standard ATX-sized motherboard. It only has four memory slots, so that may have changed some of the memory timings and possibly have improved some of the scores by a small amount.

One a side note, FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE users will also benefit from the newly added support for HyperThreading found in all P4-based Xeons and the 3.06GHz P4. More info can be had here. I'm not sure if that feature is also available in 5.0-CURRENT (I would think it would be MFC).

Take a real good look at AMD's roadmaps:

Dual Cla-whammers are GONE.

AMD evidently decided to force the enthusiast/mini-server market to choose to buy-up ( dual sledge-hammers, and at the prices involved .. NBL ), or

buy-down ( Dual Athlons

Mean ( well, not really mean, but .. wahh!! . . ), but effective ( for their bottom-line ).

Mind you, there are 2 other significant concerns in replacing my system ( I'm in the segment they .. decided to ignore ):

1. Silent System: .. those Cla-whammer HSFs look huge/possibly-noisy, or, if the chips really are low-wattage, then they'll be really silent under a copper HS with a Verax.de fan on it, and

2. as someone else mentioned, HD CPU usage, but the solution for that ( waitaminit, we dissolve stuff to fix our PC's? ) is to use Serial-ATA ( non-blocking, and non-redundancy-of-commands ).
And with Linux, the Silicon Image chip based S-ATA controllers are supported in 2.6, so grab these, then, rather than the non-open-source HighPoint, or the outright opposed-to-open-source Promise.

Lost Circuits Benchmarks ( stunning ), and CyberCPU.net ( it's the low-CPU, 8% vs 44%, that puts S-ATA into the phenomenosphere ), and .. I'd heard that Seagate is implementing out-of-order-execution for its upcoming S-ATA drives, which oughta make 'em punchier..

( for the TLA-challenged, the CLA in Cla-whammer, the new AMD desktop chip, stands for the Canadian Luge Association, and if these chips are able to flatten luge , they're damn capable, and..
the above usage of NBL stands for Not Bloody Likely, as rememberers of the film-version of Pygmalion may remember.. My Bloody Fair Lady, I think it were callethed.. hmmm.. )

Fucked-In-The-Head mistakes I make when annoyed/tired:

THIS is the board I was trying to recommend you try in your prototyper machine...

Why?

Athlon's floating-point-optimized CPUs are, I gather, drastically faster than Intel's streaming-multimedia optimized CPUs in most engineering stuff, and the DUAL CPU 'board will mean the machine still responds, even when one CPU's saturated.

Why'd I recommend 3GB? because you can't functionally get 4GB into 'em: the PCI devices eat about .5GB, so 3.5's as high as can sanely be got.

Sorry I can't provide the link to the quotes/benchmarks of that chip-designer guy who'd compared both Intel 'boards and AMD 'boards, but .. damn, it was significant difference, between 'em.

Also, I'm REALLY recommending/seconding that advice that you take it one unit at a time, but amplifying on it: build prototypes so you understand the 'gotchas' involved, and are able to get hard data on the different subsystems in your intended answer.

1. don't buy an Itanic, if you're going with Opteron for its ultra-fast RAM ( compared with Itanic ) and drastic cost-effectiveness ( ditto ), an Itanic won't show you whether Opteron'd be a good match: the architectures are totally different.

2. RAID storage: don't buy Promise 'raid' cards ( and DON'T do 'raid' 0/1, do RAID-5 ).

Why? ..
1. it ISN'T possible to use S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics in your drives with the Promise ones, at least ( you'll crash the PCI-bus, hanging, fatally, the machine, using Promise chips .. don't know about Highpoint or Adaptec ), and...
2. they oppose Open Source drivers, and coders, for their own products.

Highpoint has only SuSE 7.3-8.0/Redhat-whatever ( IIRC ) drivers for their fast 1520 cards, but if you want compute performance, you want Gentoo... ( and SuSE's been at 8.1 for ages, now... )

Adaptec? I don't know if their cards have the same issues as the Promise/Highpoint, but their cards compete with Promise's, and so probably cut corners in similar ways ( I'd love to see hard data on that point, though )...

3ware are the only cheap ( compared with SCSI ) RAID controllers I know-of, that offer bootable, real, actual, S.M.A.R.T.able RAID on ATA drives.

( I'd stick scads of 120GB IBM 180GXPs on 'em, because they're cooler-running than the 180GB versions, and better than most other drives: fast, quiet, reliable-looking, etc .. quiet means, to me, that wear&tear isn't happening as much, though I wonder-at the No-Seagate rule expressed earlier... is it that fluid-bearings fail soon? or that Seagate has worthless support from our perspective? )

3. SuSE or Gentoo are really your only choice, that I can see.

Why? .. 1. Redhat's trying to microsoft linux, by ignoring standards and making its way law, and Mandrake's .. a flaky ( though fast ) variant originally based on Redhat... I'm fed-up with both, but YKMV ( metric, here )..
2. SuSE includes damn-near every program-capability one could imagine, and has excellent hardware support ( beyond any others' )..
3. Gentoo's compiled specifically for the hardware you are running, and with --buildpkg you get to build on one, then copy all the tbz2's built, to all of the other ( identical ) machines, and just install 'em, and voilá: ultra-performance.

Misc Links:

Chassis, suitable for lots-of-drives NAS type thing.. or this one for well-cooled system ( thick aluminum's a good conductor of heat, and that makes for a longer-living, less-downtime machine )

I'd use Athlons, but that's just me ( Intel's murdered/crippled WAY too many CPUs, and chipsets, for me to be loyal to them ), and would use these HSFs with Verax.de ( or Panasonic Panaflo ) fans on 'em, just because the noise machines make increase sick-time and reduce health/sanity/productivity so damn much.

Consider using P/Ss like these, remembering that 1. they're REALLY quiet only when running at about 50% load, and 2. the UPS-VA-rating you need for each one is DOUBLE the delivered-watts rating of the P/S.
Also, you want LINE-INTERACTIVE UPSs on all machines. ( NO data-corruption due to brown-outs or other glitches ).

I'd consider dual-CPU machines standard for the desktop, simply because even if a CPU was saturated, on that machine, the machine'd still respond, and I'd stuff as much quick RAM into it as I possibly could ( 3GB/desktop, for engineers ), and I'd ALWAYS use ECC RAM.

Consider this board as something to compare against, with Something Like This KVR266X72C25/1G or this times 3 of 'em, per motherboard.

Like the Marines: Capability-based, not capability-choked, right?

The best advice I've seen on this page is

1. get a GOOD admin ( character, more than anything, values, sanity, cultural-harmony-with-you: you CAN change someone's skillset, you CANNOT change their nature ), and

2. metrics, understanding precisely what 'success' means, what the context is, etc...

3. do it one unit at-a-time

Oh, yeah, here's an Opteron-board news link... ( I'm waiting for lots-of-SATAs-on-board )...

Finally, change the ferro-resonant ballasts in your flourescent lighting to RF ballasts, and switch to Phillips TL-930 4' fluorescent tubes ( Colour Rendition Index of 95, rather than the cheap-cool-white CRI 50!! ), and your health will improve, significantly ( you can then ask for a raise, for your increased effectiveness, see )... if you find the warm-white of the TL-930s ( 3000K ) not brilliant/awakening enough, then mix-in a couple of TL-950s ( 5000K, mid-day-sunshine/sky colour ), to punch-up your alertness.

More info here

Building an SMP system can be cheap. You just gotta know where to look for help (comp.periphs.mainboards.tyan). It's as simple as:
1. Buy two $50 Athlon XP 1600 chips
2. Buy Tyan S2466 760MPX board
3. Buy up to two 1gb sticks non-ecc non-reg ddr ram (or you can go the ecc route if you want to max it out at 4gb)
4. SMP!

"Pentium 4s have no multi-cpu board designs..." Really?
Intel seem to think otherwise
And here's a nice quad processor board for them.

Ok, Well after reading the first hundred or so posts I've realized that most of you are strokeing your ego's and not awnsering the man's question!

Now, Simply put here are some sites that contain a lot of information to digest.
Tom's Hardware
AnandTech

Now here is a list of components to pick, and please do your self a favour and do some resarch before hand, get some do's and dont's and faq's stuck in your skull before spending any hard earned dough.

BTW I build systems on the side for the not so techniclly apt (as I'm sure many /. readers do for friends and family!).

Heres your shopping list
1. CASE w/PS (at least 350W ATX and a size you could "Grow" into)
2. Mother Board (Think long and hard about this one as it is a more important choice than even your CPU or RAM). Personal recomendations include ECS, MSI, Asus, and if you like spending money Tyan. Not to mention Gigabyte, Abit and shuttle, however if you visit the both tom's and anands they will have all the links for you with recent information and benchmarks. 3. CPU (what ever you want to spend on this will directly determine the capabilities of your system hence money=power!)
4. Ram (your options are limited by the capablilties of your motherboard.).
5. Video (again do you play video games or do you simply fart around in office all day and surf the net?). And if you play video games how much power do you need (can you afford to spend upwards of $400 on a card?).
6. Sound (Are you a musicaian, do you want home-theatre quality or is the AC'97 on the motherboard good enough for you?).
7. Optical devices (DVD, CD-ROM, CDRW, DVDRW?) again functionality direclty determined by price. DVDRW drives cost roughly $300 - $500 and the media is $4 to $8 per (and when you screw up they make expensive coasters). On the other hand I pay about 12 cents us per blank CD-R. (I purchase bulk!).
8. Storage (again price determins functionality). all drives now start at around 40GB and cost about $70 to $150.

9. Printing/Scaning (do you need a multifunction device to deal with the "real" paper world?).

10. Lastly but definitly most important! Connectivity! Will you get DSL? Do you already have a DOCSIS compliant cable provider in your area? or are you stuck with a measly little 56K modem? (I'm sorry I'm biased by my Canauk 3.5MB/s DSL.) The choice is simple if you get a modem stick with USRobitics or GVC. (both have lifetime warrenties). If you get a NIC (Network Interface Card), then you may consider weather or not you'll use the added features of a $50 3Com or weather or not a $10 Realtek will do?

Now you have a lot of foot work to do, quotes are a bitch! I only say that haveing worked in a computer store sales environment. They take time effort and forethought. You will get out of it what you put into it. If you simply think "Ok I'll get one of those dell's or compaq's and add what I need as I go!" well then you will be stuck with whatever decisions you make. Keep in mind computer parts depreceate faster than Ford Pinto's! So if you maintain a steady investment then you will have great preformance at price point that would make any scrouge druel. Stay away from used hardware unles it has a warrenty! Refurbished monitors are a huge saveings and have a one year warrenty. Realisticly you should simply say "This is my budget and this is what I need!" If you know what your doing (after all that reading!) then you'll get a killer deal. If you like you can even email me and I'll send you a quote .

A note to the rest of you /.'ers my first computoy was a crappy zenith vic clone that turned up the daisy's to a cup of tea across the keyboard. Peek and Poke are KEWL! The second system I used was a MICOM (Text ONLY! muahahah in beautiful PUKE ORANGE!), and the first color system I ever touched was a comodore 128 (with a whopping 128K). The first system I purchased (I will never buy a name brand again!) was a crappy AST (no they don't exist anymore!) and the first system I built was a 386SX, followed by a K6 266 and then an Abit BP-6 (man $70/processor and there are 2). Now I run a dual Athalon setup (Yes I render stuff and cant work without multitasking). My older computing geek friends tell me of the 'days of yore' when your 'codeing tools' consisted of a hole punch and bristol board cut to the right size, analog computers, and the first IBM/Amdhal S360's that in thier old age required physical battery to operate properly.

Have you looked at Tyan's offerings? Seriously, their Tiger series has several boards with 64 bit PCI slots, and so does their Trinity series for P4 boards. The Tiger's are all dual proc mobos, but the Trinity is single proc. If you want AMD, you must get the dual proc board, but if you like intel, then you can get either single or dual proc boards.

I think that there are some other companies that offer the 64 bit PCI, but Tyan is the only one that I know of right off the top of my head, and IMHO they are a good solid company in terms of their products. I haven't heard anyone complain about them yet.

I've yet to find an AMD motherboard with onboard SCSI (granted, I have only looked in a few places but.. you'd think they'd be common from ASUS).

The Tyan Thunder K7 includes dual-channel Adaptec Ultra160 SCSI, dual 3Com Fast Ethernet NICs, an AGP Pro 50 slot, 64-bit PCI, and a bunch of other stuff. It's also a dual-processor board, so you get twice the Athlon goodness. :-)

"What I care about is not having to worry about the latest VIA drivers wrecking my system or hoping the bargain motehrboard I purchased for my AMD CPU won't gie me problems in 6 months." Well, duh, if you don't VIA problems?, DON'T BUY A VIA BASED BOARD If you don't want problems with a cheapass motherboard, don't BUY a cheapass motherboard. might I suggest the Tyan Tiger K7 MPX How come I never see people saying they are going to avoid intel because the VIA Apollo Pro / P4X266 chipsets suck?, we can play 'Worst. Case. Scenario.' too you know.

The Tyan Tiger MP kicks ass, IMHO. (AMD 760MP chipset). I've been running it since December, never crashed (from hardware, anyway. :-) One note with this board, be sure to get a *heavy-duty* power supply. My SMP box has an Enermax EG651P-VE-something or other (550W), which works *very* well (but is kind of expensive).

Be sure to stay away from the AMD 760MPX chipset (note the X) until early March, because on the current revision, *USB doesn't work at all on the Southbridge* (although I've heard vendors are shipping USB 2.0 cards to get around this problem, but do you really want to lose a PCI slot?)

I own a Tyan Tiger MP, and in the users manual it only supports up to the Althon 1600.

Actually, you are right. However, Tyan now manufactures a motherboard that is "approved" (not necessariyl by AMD) to work with Athlon XP Processors (not just XPs masquerading as MPs).
The board is the Tyan Tiger MPX (S2466)

TigerMP.
And a review

Furthermore, I've heard all sorts of horrible things about VIA's KT266 chipset, and now that there are alternatives, there's really no reason to buy it at all. SiS's AMD chipset rocks (if you don't believe me, read this, but if you're going for cost-no-object performance, you'll want one of tyan's mobos w/ AMD's own chipset.

Also, Creative has a new sound card out, and it has built in firewire, and considering that, it's not too much more than the platinum. And you may want to at least consider ATI graphics solutions, esp if you're ever going to run linux on this machine. From the reviews I've read, the 8500 is comparable or better than the GeForce3 in most ways. If everyone starts considering nvidia a foregone conclusion, it won't be long before we don't have a choice at all.

As far as the silent drive thing goes, insulating a device that is supposed to be conduction cooled (ie it conducts heat through its metal casing) is a very bad idea! nuf said.

Finally, those of you considering those nifty round IDE cables may want to read this first.

In closing, I would like to point out that this article was little more than a shameless plug for thinkgeek and pc power and cooling. All of the choices that didn't involve these stores were ill thought out. And you'll notice when it comes to the cpu fan, a very important piece of hardware these days, he didn't even bother telling us what he bought, only that he got it from pc power and cooling!

If Hemos ever had any creditibility, he just pimped it out to thinkgeek and pc power and cooling. Oh well. I guess in these troubled times, ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

It amazes me the amount of 'software' guys who think they're experts but have no idea when it comes to hardware.

Check these examples out:-

- "Do get a pure PCI-bus machine (not a hybrid PCI/ISA design, you sacrifice about 10% of peak performance with those)."

This is pure humbug - you do not get 10% greater performance by buying a motherboard that has ni ISA slots (like those Asus KT boards). Because the fact is that even if they have no ISA slots, they still have a ISA bus built in the southbridge to support legacy stuff like the printer/parrallel port, the serial port/s & the PS2 mouse & keyboard ports. Now as far as the USB ports are concerned, I'm not sure whether they use the ISA bus or the PCI bus.

- "For the power supply, the three of us easily agreed on a vendor: PC Power & Cooling"

Bloody typical. Yet the reality is that the PC Power & Cooling mob are just 'badge engineers' - they re-sell other manufacturers products with their own own brand markings & inflated prices.

For example their full tower case is just a California PC full tower case with a custom bezel on the front.

Now as far as their power supplies are concerned. I remember when they used to sell a 'Silencer' model 275 watt power supply. In fact all it was was a generic 300 watt power supply, de-rated down to 275 watts so it was understressed, so it would cope with retro-actively fitted low speed 'silencer' fan.

As far as powersupplies are concerned I recommend the Enermax 350 watt EG365P-VE(FC) or 450 watt EG465P-VE(FC) power supplies. They have a push/pull dual fan design (a 80mm exhaust fan at the back & a 92mm intake fan at the bottom), which means the fans can run at a much slower (therefore quieter) speed, without losing any cooling performance. The Powersupply comes with a standard motherboard 3 pin senser connector cable, so you can blug it into a spare motherboard fan header, which means ifyou can see what revs one of the power supply fans are running at in you PC monitor applet in you system tray (& it can warn you with an alarm if it fails). Also the powersupply comes with a thermastat on a connector which can be somehow attached to the heatsink or against the CPU core if its a exposed flip-chip type core (as long as it has no heatspreader like the AMD K6 series has), this controls the fan underneath the powersupply & it only runs when necessary. Consequently these power supplies are so bloody quiet you sometimes think its not running.

- They also recommend the Thunder K7 (S2462) Motherboard, which is a huge waste of money as you can buy a very similar motherboard made by the same manufaturer at a much cheaper price (the Tiger MP (S2460) Motherboard). Also the 'Tiger' has a standard ATX connector, rather than the propietry connector that the 'Thunder' has. Which means you can use normal ATX powersupplies, rather than the inflated priced propietry powersupply that the 'Thunder' uses.

- Also, even though this is s'pose to be a 'Ultimate Linux Box', they fail to mention that both IDE floppy drives(if you are using the IDE bus) & SCSI floppy drives (if you are using a SCSI BUS) are avaliable. Even better one can get the LS120 variety which are compatible with both 120MB 'SupperFloppies' & standard 1.4MB standard floppies.

- They spend 4 paragraphs talking about 'Noise Control and Heat Dissipation' without really saying anything. When all they really needed to say that it's best using bigger fans at slower speeds - such as 12 volt 120mm fans running at 7 volts (positive hooked up to the 12 volt line while the negative is hooked up to the 5 volt line). The quietist fans (all other things being equal) by brand are the Papst Simtec bearing fans, the Sanyo Denki fans & the L1A1 versions of the Panaflo fans.

- They recommend a pretty well generic (though above average) Antec case, but this is s'pose to be a ultimate Linux box.

Therfore I recommend the Addtronics 'Server Cases' (their full tower cases) - the 7890 & the 7896. They are great cases with their great cooling options, filtered intakes, butterfly doors & slide out 'mainboard & I/O backplane tray'. Supermicro sell their own badge engineered version of this full tower case.

Other good full tower cases are the all alloy ones made by Lian Li. Such as the Lian Li PC-70 aluminium full tower computer case & the Lian Li PC-76 server case

If a mid tower case is more your style, both Lian Li & Coolermaster maker great alloy ones. They are great for LAN parties. In this regard I recommend the Lian Li PC-60 computer case & the Coolermaster ATC-201SX. Both cases are unbeatable as mid-tower cases - they have everything. I Personally thing a midtower case must have 4 5.25inch drive bays; so you can have both a CD burner & DVD drive, plus 2 HDDs in removable HDD pullout caddies.

For a ultimate box it should have the all alloy (better heat dissapation) twin fan caddies that agains are made by Lian Li. The 3 best models appear to be the RH-620 , the RH-600 , & the RH-29

For the motherboard, I'd recommend one with the SIS 735 'chipset'. Preferably it would have a AGP Pro slot, 6 PCI slots, one shared with a ISA slot at the bottom. It would have BOTH 2 DDR slots & 2 normal SDRAM slots. It would have a integrated RJ45 network connector above the 2 rear USB ports, plus integrated 'hardware' 5.1 sound (IWill have brought out a couple of boards of late with integrated 'hardware' 5.1 sound, they have the 3 standard female jack ports under the midi 'D' plug at the back, plus the extra connects hook up via a ribbon cable & a slot backplane cover). The board would also have integrated SCSI & Firewire like some of the MSI Pro or Turbo or whatever boards have. Plus an extra IDE controller (Promise, Highpoint, etc) so there's the potential for 8 drives (HDD, CD, DVD, LS120, ORB, etc) rather than the standard 4. The extra IDE controller will also have RAID 0,1 & 1+0 options (most have this built in, though its sometimes disabled). All the integrated stuff must have the capability to be disabled, either via jumpers or in the BIOS.

Twin AthonXP/MP CPUs would be the go (the XPs work fine in SMP setups, they just are not certified/supported for such configurations - that's the main difference between the XP & MP, the MPs are certified/supported for SMP use.

That's enough raving for now.

It amazes me the amount of 'software' guys who think they're experts but have no idea when it comes to hardware.

Check these examples out:-

- "Do get a pure PCI-bus machine (not a hybrid PCI/ISA design, you sacrifice about 10% of peak performance with those)."

This is pure humbug - you do not get 10% greater performance by buying a motherboard that has ni ISA slots (like those Asus KT boards). Because the fact is that even if they have no ISA slots, they still have a ISA bus built in the southbridge to support legacy stuff like the printer/parrallel port, the serial port/s & the PS2 mouse & keyboard ports. Now as far as the USB ports are concerned, I'm not sure whether they use the ISA bus or the PCI bus.

- "For the power supply, the three of us easily agreed on a vendor: PC Power & Cooling"

Bloody typical. Yet the reality is that the PC Power & Cooling mob are just 'badge engineers' - they re-sell other manufacturers products with their own own brand markings & inflated prices.

For example their full tower case is just a California PC full tower case with a custom bezel on the front.

Now as far as their power supplies are concerned. I remember when they used to sell a 'Silencer' model 275 watt power supply. In fact all it was was a generic 300 watt power supply, de-rated down to 275 watts so it was understressed, so it would cope with retro-actively fitted low speed 'silencer' fan.

As far as powersupplies are concerned I recommend the Enermax 350 watt EG365P-VE(FC) or 450 watt EG465P-VE(FC) power supplies. They have a push/pull dual fan design (a 80mm exhaust fan at the back & a 92mm intake fan at the bottom), which means the fans can run at a much slower (therefore quieter) speed, without losing any cooling performance. The Powersupply comes with a standard motherboard 3 pin senser connector cable, so you can blug it into a spare motherboard fan header, which means ifyou can see what revs one of the power supply fans are running at in you PC monitor applet in you system tray (& it can warn you with an alarm if it fails). Also the powersupply comes with a thermastat on a connector which can be somehow attached to the heatsink or against the CPU core if its a exposed flip-chip type core (as long as it has no heatspreader like the AMD K6 series has), this controls the fan underneath the powersupply & it only runs when necessary. Consequently these power supplies are so bloody quiet you sometimes think its not running.

- They also recommend the Thunder K7 (S2462) Motherboard, which is a huge waste of money as you can buy a very similar motherboard made by the same manufaturer at a much cheaper price (the Tiger MP (S2460) Motherboard). Also the 'Tiger' has a standard ATX connector, rather than the propietry connector that the 'Thunder' has. Which means you can use normal ATX powersupplies, rather than the inflated priced propietry powersupply that the 'Thunder' uses.

- Also, even though this is s'pose to be a 'Ultimate Linux Box', they fail to mention that both IDE floppy drives(if you are using the IDE bus) & SCSI floppy drives (if you are using a SCSI BUS) are avaliable. Even better one can get the LS120 variety which are compatible with both 120MB 'SupperFloppies' & standard 1.4MB standard floppies.

- They spend 4 paragraphs talking about 'Noise Control and Heat Dissipation' without really saying anything. When all they really needed to say that it's best using bigger fans at slower speeds - such as 12 volt 120mm fans running at 7 volts (positive hooked up to the 12 volt line while the negative is hooked up to the 5 volt line). The quietist fans (all other things being equal) by brand are the Papst Simtec bearing fans, the Sanyo Denki fans & the L1A1 versions of the Panaflo fans.

- They recommend a pretty well generic (though above average) Antec case, but this is s'pose to be a ultimate Linux box.

Therfore I recommend the Addtronics 'Server Cases' (their full tower cases) - the 7890 & the 7896. They are great cases with their great cooling options, filtered intakes, butterfly doors & slide out 'mainboard & I/O backplane tray'. Supermicro sell their own badge engineered version of this full tower case.

Other good full tower cases are the all alloy ones made by Lian Li. Such as the Lian Li PC-70 aluminium full tower computer case & the Lian Li PC-76 server case

If a mid tower case is more your style, both Lian Li & Coolermaster maker great alloy ones. They are great for LAN parties. In this regard I recommend the Lian Li PC-60 computer case & the Coolermaster ATC-201SX. Both cases are unbeatable as mid-tower cases - they have everything. I Personally thing a midtower case must have 4 5.25inch drive bays; so you can have both a CD burner & DVD drive, plus 2 HDDs in removable HDD pullout caddies.

For a ultimate box it should have the all alloy (better heat dissapation) twin fan caddies that agains are made by Lian Li. The 3 best models appear to be the RH-620 , the RH-600 , & the RH-29

For the motherboard, I'd recommend one with the SIS 735 'chipset'. Preferably it would have a AGP Pro slot, 6 PCI slots, one shared with a ISA slot at the bottom. It would have BOTH 2 DDR slots & 2 normal SDRAM slots. It would have a integrated RJ45 network connector above the 2 rear USB ports, plus integrated 'hardware' 5.1 sound (IWill have brought out a couple of boards of late with integrated 'hardware' 5.1 sound, they have the 3 standard female jack ports under the midi 'D' plug at the back, plus the extra connects hook up via a ribbon cable & a slot backplane cover). The board would also have integrated SCSI & Firewire like some of the MSI Pro or Turbo or whatever boards have. Plus an extra IDE controller (Promise, Highpoint, etc) so there's the potential for 8 drives (HDD, CD, DVD, LS120, ORB, etc) rather than the standard 4. The extra IDE controller will also have RAID 0,1 & 1+0 options (most have this built in, though its sometimes disabled). All the integrated stuff must have the capability to be disabled, either via jumpers or in the BIOS.

Twin AthonXP/MP CPUs would be the go (the XPs work fine in SMP setups, they just are not certified/supported for such configurations - that's the main difference between the XP & MP, the MPs are certified/supported for SMP use.

That's enough raving for now.

While we're at it, I'm going to post the specs on a more down-to-earth machine that I'll be building shortly. My ultimate goal is to create the ultimate workstation / gaming box that won't sound like a small aircraft when you turn it on.

$189 Seagate Barracuda IV SoftSonic 80 Gig
The 'Cuda IV is probably the quietest and one of the fastest Ultra-100 Drives in existence. A pair of 40-gig platters with Softsonic fluid-bearing motors keep the noise down below 30dB

$757 2x1.2Ghz AthlonMP
2x256 ECC DDR RAM
Tyan Tiger MP
2xThermalTake VolcanoII Cooler
The Tiger is the baby-brother of the Thunder. You get the same performance as the Thunder, without the extras, such as on-board SCSI, & integrated ethernet. You can look up specs at tyan.com.All of these components may be purchased, pretested, from Monarch Computers as an "AMD Pretested Combo;" Monarch produces very high quality boxes (my last three, actually).

$070 SD-M1502 Toshiba 16X DVD Drive
This drive's a fairly good performer, (try a google search for the model number and "review"), but what I am interested in is the noise and vibration factors. Toshiba's introduced a type of balance mechanism designed to handle unbalanced / cheap discs.

$335 Asus GeForce3 Pure 64Meg AGP
At this point, the choice of video card is purely up to the builder; I chose this one simply because it was one of the better performing, and the higher quality cards (google will tell all about this card...)

$85 SB Audigy X-Gamer!
Hey, why not? At $85, it's not a bad deal at all for a new whiz-bang sound card.
??? Speakers?
Up to you.

$014 floppy
Duh. Pick one.

$170? Lian-Li PC-60 Case
Reasons for this part: 1. It's cool. Literally.
2. It's light-weight.
3. Lian-Li cases are extremely high quality, which explains the high price.

$089 Enermax Whisper 431W EG465P-VE(FC) Power Supply
The Whisper is an ultra-quiet PS with variable speed fans. If you look at the Product Page, you can see the various nice specs on this PS.

$214 24X10X40 Plextor CD-RW
Based on various net reviews (again, google), this is the current burner of choice. That'll probably change by the time I finish typing this setence, but that's the nature of the technology.

$80 Wireless Keyboard / Optical Wireless Mouse from Logitech
As a long-time logitech fan, the Logitech Cordless Freedom Optical takes all of the good stuff from their keyboards, mice, and wireless devices and wraps it into one package. Note that RF mice are not very good for games. I've owned one of these for about a month, and can say that I have no problems with either device until I try to play DoD or Q3A, in which case my trusty Mouseman Optical comes in handy.

$1918 Subtotal sans Shipping (If the numbers don't add up, I'm gonna look really, really stupid. Oh well.) (updated price 10-13-01)

Most of my price info came from either Pricewatch or MySimon, fyi.

I'm not sure if you can install Tualatin processors with a Slotket into a BX board and have it run, but my guess is that someone probably has done it ;-)

As far as the board's support for the 1Ghz PIII processor, you may need to flash the BIOS for it to support the higher multipliers (and maybe voltage?). If you haven't checked out Tyan's website, (www.tyan.com, I would check it out and see if they have any more information available about your motherboard and support for higher speed Pentium III processors.

1) Get:
- 1U 4bays rack mountable chassis from Sliger Designs
- 3WARE 6410 Escalade IDE controller (Choice of 0/1/0+1/5 Raid) on a 90 PCI riser card
- 4 x 75/100GB ATA100 drives (maybe DiamondMax)
- MicroATX mainboard with NIC and Video integrated on board (invest in RAM not in processing power - 750/850MHZ should be more than sufficient)
- Minimum Linux/*BSD OS booting from a read-only 16 to 64MB flash IDE device, loading kernel and a customised Ramdisk root filesystem, mounting Raid devices in R/W mode, starting SAMBA (and/or Netatalk).
A good starting point is Linux Bootdisk HOWTO

2) Choose 0+1 Raid and you get quick and completely redundant 150/200GB storage that can survive the full failure of one disk.

3) Want remote grafical managment from a standard web browser? Go for Webmin or SWAT.

well, yes, sorta. I have like 3 hundred something in my machine now, I don't even remember, but, when building a machine (like I do), always check how much ram the board can max out at...
I've seen boards where max is 512mb, or even less...
My Tyan Tiger 100 happens to be a gig max (flexing muscles)
Needless to say, you never know when your gonna max out..especially when you boot up and its already using 96mb of ram..

.kb

In case anyone's still reading this discussion, check out the following Tyan page:

Tyan Tomcat motherboards

You'll notice all 3 motherboards are the Micro ATX form-factor, and the last one outright states that it's "Rackmount Ready".

In some ways I like the look of these Tyan boards more than the ASUS ones. These aren't limited to a 333MHz maximum, and they also skip the lame ISA slots to give you more PCI slots. The only downside is the lack of an AGP slot (darn!).

I second that. If your hardware is marginal or faulty, you will have problems, no matter what you're running.

Here's my horror story...

For those who are interested in my system specs:

Athlon 500 Processor
Gigabyte GA-7IX mainboard
128M PC100 Ram (single DIMM)
ATI All-in-Wonder 128 AGP
2 9.1 GB SCSI HDs
LS120 IDE drive
SB Live! Value PCI
Linksys 10/100 Eathernet NIC PCI
Adaptec 2940U2W SCSI PCI
USR 56K Voice Faxmodem Pro Ext.
Pioner 6X/32X SCSI DVD-ROM

OS is Mandrake Linux 7.0-2

Long story short...

First mainboard turned out to be DOA out of the box. Second mainboard appeared to be OK, but, after a couple of weeks in operation, the system started crashing...

Here's how bad it was; the crashes were the nasty ones where the system would completely lock-up, and could only be recovered by the L Alt-SysRq song-and-dance. Unfourtunitly, it doesn't always work...

Sometimes the crashes were random, but some of the crashes occoured after certian events (ex. loading a >1MB file to/from the LS120 drive, heavy disk/IO activaty under certian conditions). It even crashed, with a kernel panic, durning an fsck! Meraculessly, the system survived, I was able to repair it, and it's still working (for better or worse), I,m typing this post on it right now. And the crashes left no clues in the system logs (you know that you have a defianate hardware problem if that happens).

Hardware problems are the most diffacult to diagnose, especialy if you don't have hardware testing equiptment, and I know that through painful experance.

I latter determined that the problem was the mainboard, or, more spificly, the mainboard IO bridge. I didn't think it was phyicaly possable, but this sucks, blows, and bites all at the same time.

Rigth now I,m waiting until the replacement MB gets here. Believe me, it's not going to be gigabyte, two bad MBs in a row doesn't inspire confidince in the manufacture's quality control.

Anybody have any thoughts on Tyan's Athlon MB? I decieded to go with that MB because of thier reputation, and it doesn't have these awfull windows-only fetures (ex. AMR slot).

To quote the article at gamepc : "VIA's dual processor solution is still quite a while away"

Don't tell that to Tyan. They've got the dual coppermine mobo with a VIA chipset ready to go.

This is supposed to ship within days, and there are a dozen vendors which are set to have it. I was quoted a date of May 20, but that may have slipped. Egghead says they have 1000 on order.

140 bucks for an SMP mobo?! The only question is how do you get a Tyan to overclock. The answer usually is, "you don't". But they are usually extremely stable, so it's amazing they are using VIA!

kabloie

Disclaimers:
Yes, I realize this is semi-offtopic.
I have no personal financial interest in Tyan whatsoever.

Disclaimers:
Yes, I realize this is semi-offtopic.
I have no personal financial interest in Tyan whatsoever.

You also want to support lots of RAM. But the motherboards most places are selling (including Gateway's 1000MHz Athlon system) are limited to either 384M or maybe 768M of memory (the VIA chipset, like on Tyan's S2380, is a good example of a high-end board for the Athlon.

On top of that, there's still no multi-processor (forget that....how about DUAL processor?) motherboard for the Athlon. You can get dual processing MBs for Pentium-III's cheaply, and >2 processor MBs for Xeons, if you want to pay the price.

Just wanted to mention.... of course, even the non-Xeon Pentium-III has relatively few motherboards available that will support over 768M of memory, but you can go to the the Xeon and get MBs with up to 2GB (easily) 4GB (just becoming available from Tyan and others). 1GB is available for regular PIII's from several vendors.

Disclaimer: My system is a Athlon 700MHz. It rocks.

PS: Gee, Compaq: You'd think that when you issue a press release about your new system, you'd actually be selling them, but you're not (at least on your Web site). Gateway is....

... recently released not too long ago.

The Athlon is an impressive chip. Let us wait till the end of October to decide which company (Intel, AMD) has the bigger balls and better staying power!

By then, AMD will have their Server and Enterprise Editions (smells like Win2K) and their motherboards with SMP and all that mess.

Keep also in mind that the baddest motherboard makers (Tyan, ABit, AOpen, etc.) will be releasing motherboards for the Athlon.

If Tyan made a board for the Athlon that is similiar to their Thunderbolt for Intel... [official drool]


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