First Intel Quad Core Ready Desktop Mobo Spotted
MojoDog writes "Today Universal Abit launched their AW9D and
AW9D-MAX motherboards based on the Intel 975X chipset. There has been much
anticipation in the industry for this series and as far as looks go, these
boards are built to please. One interesting bullet point in the spec list
is that these boards are "Quad Core Ready", in line with a possible year-end
release of
Intel's Quad-Core Kentsfield CPU perhaps? Time will tell!"
Of course some people are always going to want to have the fastest game machine on the block. But seriously, it's amazing the kind of performance you can get these days with cheap, low-end hardware. Yesterday I built a machine for $300 with a 3 GHz P4 and 1 Gb of ram. (I reused a hard disk, so that cut the price a little.) Sure I could have built a dual-core system, but I would have ended up with a machine that cost many times more, used tons of power, and had almost identical performance except when I had two cpu-intensive processes running at once (i.e., almost never).
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If you live in high altitude areas, ECC RAM is really necessary if you want reliable computing. Even with ECC, higher-end servers will "scrub" memory by periodically reading out every memory block to correct single-bit errors before they become double-bit errors.
The Virginia Apple Supercomputer initially used non-ECC nodes. Couldn't keep the machine up and they ended up selling off all of the original Xserve machines to get ECC Xserve's.
At Los Alamos altitude, the problem is even worse. It isn't uncommon for non-ECC workstations to crash every other day.