From owner-freebsd-amd64@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Feb 13 03:32:05 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 70F0516A4CF for ; Fri, 13 Feb 2004 03:32:05 -0800 (PST) Received: from sarajevo.pacific.net.sg (sarajevo.pacific.net.sg [203.120.90.134]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 91E9743D2F for ; Fri, 13 Feb 2004 03:32:04 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from oceanare@pacific.net.sg) Received: (qmail 27085 invoked from network); 13 Feb 2004 11:32:02 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO maxwell6.pacific.net.sg) (203.120.90.212) by sarajevo with SMTP; 13 Feb 2004 11:32:02 -0000 Received: from pacific.net.sg ([210.24.202.170]) by maxwell6.pacific.net.sg with ESMTP id <20040213113202.UGHX9972.maxwell6.pacific.net.sg@pacific.net.sg>; Fri, 13 Feb 2004 19:32:02 +0800 Message-ID: <402CB5B1.4070505@pacific.net.sg> Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 19:32:01 +0800 From: Erich Dollansky Organization: oceanare pte ltd User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113 X-Accept-Language: en, en-us, de MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Willem Jan Withagen References: <0b8201c3f222$a7d3eec0$471b3dd4@dual> In-Reply-To: <0b8201c3f222$a7d3eec0$471b3dd4@dual> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit cc: adridg@cs.kun.nl cc: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org Subject: Re: System advice requested X-BeenThere: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list 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 11:32:05 -0000 Hi, Willem Jan Withagen wrote: > Like you suggest: > I've also got some taxes to burn It looks like this is the reason for many of the big machines. > I knew about the SATA stuff from current@, but I would expect that > carefull choices can prevent some of the major pittfalls. > I'll have a go at the archive. > If you are already at burning money, take SCSI. Those boards are available with two SCSI U320 channels. It also gives you a real speed gain. I have a dual Athlon box. It has had for a while an additional IDE drive. It is real slow compared to SCSI and give a pretty high CPU load compared to SCSI. >>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". >> A dual machine has even under load an extremely snappy desktop. The general speed gain is really not worth to mention, but the responsivnes of an SMP machine is real good. I use since some years for serious machines Tyan motherboards. But I have not touched an Opteron board yet. Erich