System advice requested

[Willem Jan Withagen]

> From: "Willem Jan Withagen" <wjw at withagen.nl>
> > If I were to get a dual opteron board/system what things would be
> > to watch out for, or would be required. Hardware wise that is.
> > 
> > In the beginning I would like to use is as:
> >     1) FreeBSD/windows/linux desktop
> > and lateron it would turn into my 
> >     2) Home NFS/Samba-server running FBSD
> > 
> > In case 2) I'd remove any fancy user-interface stuff...
> > 
> > All suggestions welcomed,
> 
> To follow-up on myself...

And even more followup:

HTML-ed version on:
    http://withagen.dyndns.org/FreeBSD/notes/amd64-hardware.html

It is still every inaccurate, so suggestions are more than welcome.
There is also still very little distinction between info on
Athlon 64, single Opteron, SMP Opteron. So that creates a lot of confusion
as well.

To be honest: I would not be able to select a good board from all the 
gathered info myself.

So I'm now sort of tempted to go for an MSI K8T Master2-FAR, even though
this board has only 4 memory slots.... For me it has the advantage of 
a lot of PCI-32 slots, because I have oddles of old PCI cards.

And as always:
    Suggestions, improvements, updates, add-ons are welcome

Especially for David:
    Could you point me at the info for the 0,5 Gb loss of memory,
    so I can include that info?

--WjW