[ale] *Serious* motherboards?

[James P. Kinney III]

On Thu, 2007-09-13 at 09:40 -0600, JK wrote:
> Jim Popovitch wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2007-09-13 at 10:58 -0400, aaron wrote:
> > 
> >>>Hmmm... tempting, but since I am not (any longer) an
> >>>Atlantean, it would be more like "Very Remote Net Solutions"
> >>>in my case :-)
> >>>
> >>
> >>Hey, dude, there's this great new thing called UPS!  ;-)
> > 
> > 
> > What good is a uninterruptable power supply going to do him if he
> > doesn't have a motherboard?   
> > 
> > 
> > :-) :-)
> 
> :-)
> 
> Not to mention, I do just enjoy building my own
> boxen.  Though I admit the thought of accidentally
> bending a pin on a $500 CPU makes my stomach hurt...

The Socket F Opterons don't _have_ pins! They have contact pads. The
"pins" are in the socket and they are inverted "v" shaped springs.
> 
> The economics of this are actually not looking
> all that great.  I can probably build eight
> cheap-ass boxes in 2Ghz/2GB/100GB configurations
> for less than the price of a single box that
> would let me virtualize everything.  RAM especially
> is way expensive for server-class boxes, it seems.
> OTOH my power bills might then make my stomach hurt.
> And the whole point of this exercise is to
> put all my computational needs in a convenient
> package.
Yep. Sure can build a stack of el cheapo's for less hard cash. The
server RAM is about 2x the cheap RAM. When I sticking in 8 4G pairs
that's a large chunk of change! Most of these systems the RAM costs as
much as the case, motherboard and hard drives combined. The CPU's can
cost cost that much as well (quad core ain't cheap and the top speed
dual core ain't cheap either!).

The thing I've seen on the server-class boards is the chipset is _FAR_
superior and has a longer life-span than the consumer boards. To get the
service from a cheap board outrageous cooling is required (liquid, phase
change, seeing heat pipes now) and that adds another layer of failure
points. 

So far, I've been pretty good with the systems I've built internally for
the past 10 years. The first dual cpu system is _still_ in service (dual
PIII 500MHz - my son uses it at his box - soon to be a thin client
machine one I find a replacement fan) after 10 years. The box that is
currently driving me nuts is the compaq system my daughter uses. What a
POS! Dad got lazy and just grabbed one off the shelf and tossed on a
Fedora install. I did not notice the video ram was shared. And it tends
to run quite hot.
> 
> Of course, there's always Microwulf: 
> http://www.calvin.edu/~adams/research/microwulf/
> Which might be more appropriate for me, and just
> look at that price tag: <$2000.
> 
> -- JK
> 
> -- 
> "What can be asserted without evidence can also be
> dismissed without evidence." -- Christopher Hitchens
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> 
-- 
James P. Kinney III          
CEO & Director of Engineering 
Local Net Solutions,LLC        
770-493-8244                    
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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