From owner-freebsd-amd64@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Feb 13 03:02:09 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A8C7E16A4CE for ; Fri, 13 Feb 2004 03:02:09 -0800 (PST) Received: from wn1.sci.kun.nl (wn1.sci.kun.nl [131.174.8.1]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 20F5443D39 for ; Fri, 13 Feb 2004 03:02:09 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from adridg@sci.kun.nl) Received: from wn4.sci.kun.nl [131.174.8.3] (helo=wn4.sci.kun.nl) by wn1.sci.kun.nl (8.12.10/3.61) with ESMTP id i1DB276v028612; Fri, 13 Feb 2004 12:02:07 +0100 (MET) Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 12:02:07 +0100 (MET) From: Adriaan de Groot To: Willem Jan Withagen In-Reply-To: <0b6801c3f21f$1fd470b0$471b3dd4@dual> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII cc: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org Subject: Re: System advice requested X-BeenThere: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list Reply-To: adridg@cs.kun.nl List-Id: Porting FreeBSD to the AMD64 platform List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 11:02:09 -0000 On Fri, 13 Feb 2004, Willem Jan Withagen wrote: > 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 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". Put another way - the reason for having a dual board is massive compute power and/or massive memory. I don't see much point in having 8G of memory in a home NFS server (unless you want to cache _everything_), and for desktop use, again, a single is really all you need. Unless your house needs heating, of course. There are several hardware-issues related threads in the archives at http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-amd64/ -- it looks like some SATA stuff is to be avoided, depending on your FBSD install image the GigE may give you some trouble and require a different NIC for fetching newer sources, 4+2 DIMM configurations are crap.