Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 16:58:27 -0400 (EDT) From: Richard Cownie <tich@ma.ikos.com> To: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG, mike@smith.net.au Subject: SuperMicro P6DGE/P6DGS/P6DGU Message-ID: <199810202058.QAA19518@jefferson.ma.ikos.com>
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G'day Mike,
>> I'm trying to put together a machine with 2 PII-450 cpu's and
>> at least 1GB of DRAM (preferably 2GB). It looks as though the
>> SuperMicro P6DGE/P6DGU/P6DGS would be good - my best guess
>> so far is a P6DGS running FreeBSD 3.0.
>
>What's your budget on this system? You might be able to pull something
>off with an IBM Netfinity 5000 box; I believe they have the 2-way Xeon
>upgrade out now, and they seemed certain you could put more than 1GB of
>memory in the box.
>
>I know they have the 2-way Xeon kit on the 5500, but we don't support
>the onboard SCSI controller so you'd be losing badly there.
Based on latest prices from www.pricewatch.com, I believe we can
build a complete machine with 1GB DRAM and 2 x P2-450 for under $4500,
maybe even just under $4000. Pretty amazing eh! The cheapest ready-built
2-way Xeon + 1GB system I've found is about $7500 (www.varesearch.com).
So the home-brew solution looks attractive - especially as we could then
afford several machines if the first one works well.
The application is unusual in that it requires hours of CPU time and
approx 1GB of DRAM, but practically no disk bandwidth - a single UltraDMA
disk will be fine. This makes the big server machines (IBM Netfinity,
Dell PowerEdge 6300) unattractive, because we'd be paying for a bunch
of disk slots, power supplies, etc that we don't need.
To complicate matters, there may be a need to upgrade to 2GB of DRAM
in a few months - hence my interest in the future of 512MB DIMMs.
Regards
Richard Cownie
email: tich@ma.ikos.com
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