System advice requested

[Erich Dollansky]

Hi,

Willem Jan Withagen wrote:

> Like you suggest:
>     I've also got some taxes to burn

It looks like this is the reason for many of the big machines.

> I knew about the SATA stuff from current@, but I would expect that
> carefull choices can prevent some of the major pittfalls.
> I'll have a go at the archive.
> 
If you are already at burning money, take SCSI. Those boards are 
available with two SCSI U320 channels. It also gives you a real 
speed gain. I have a dual Athlon box. It has had for a while an 
additional IDE drive. It is real slow compared to SCSI and give a 
pretty high CPU load compared to SCSI.

>>For all of that, dual opteron sounds massively overdone. Unless you can
>>write off the system for tax purposes, or desperately want to play with
>>dually stuff, there's no performance benefit over, say, an athlon XP
>>1600+. Performance in the sense of "snappy desktop use".
>>
A dual machine has even under load an extremely snappy desktop. 
The general speed gain is really not worth to mention, but the 
responsivnes of an SMP machine is real good.

I use since some years for serious machines Tyan motherboards. But 
I have not touched an Opteron board yet.

Erich