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From: Michael Beckmann <petzi@zit.th-darmstadt.de>
To: "S(pork)" <spork@super-g.com>
cc: isp@FreeBSD.org, hardware@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: INN history file and disk I/O
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Hi there,

> We'll be building a new news server here rather soon, and I was wondering
> if anyone in on this discussion has any preferences in motherboards and
> dealers...  Our usual supplier is having some trouble coming up with a
> recommendation on a RAM-packed motherboard...

I have made very good experiences with the Gigabyte 586 HX mainboard. I
have built several machines with it. It has 6 SIMM slots. I have only used
it with 32 MB SIMMs so far, and it works very well. According to a test in
a very reputable German computer magazine, it performs slightly better
than the Asus counterpart, which has only 4 SIMM slots. The test also says
that this board is among the few that boot with 64 MB SIMMs installed.
If you equip the board with a 16 kbyte Tag RAM it will extend the
L2 cacheable area to 512 MB. The cacheable area becomes important when you
have that much RAM. Almost all motherboards do not L2 cache more than 64
megabytes. I think that 6 x 64 MB = 384 MB will make a good newsserver :-)
With a P 166 or P 200 it outperforms e.g. a SPARC 20 easily.

Another option is the Asus Double Pentium board, which has 8 SIMM slots.
The second Pentium is not supported by FreeBSD (and you don't need it for 
a news server), but I would still consider it because of the 8 SIMM slots
and the good Asus support and quality.

Hope this helps. Don't buy crap.

Michael