"budget" dual opteron system

4

400+whpwrx

Gawd
Joined
Sep 27, 2003
Messages
557
was looking at trying to build out a lower cost dual opteron box to run *nix and be used for generating large data sets. (highly cpu intensive, as well as storage and memory)


Looking at building out a tyan thunder based system with 2 242's and a few 200gb sata drives on a sata raid card (doing raid 5).

Possibly 1-2 gigs of the cheapest reliable memory i can get. (maybe more if i can swing it)

So i am asking you guys of this wonderful forum to help me out..

figuring the prices will break out as follows


Mother board Tyan S2882G3NR (Thunder K8S) AMD 8131 400
2 opteron 242's 320 (160x2)
video card on board
raid 5 controler card 230
3 250gb sata drives 330 (110x3)
4 gb of rosewill pc3200 1gb sticks 360 (90x4)

case and powersupply - allready have i assume 450w will be enough..


Anyone have any pointers or suggestions? Again this will be a *nix box (not sure which distro i should use, as im not sure which can be run in 64bit and is numa aware, some help would be nice).

Any suggestions? Any comments?

Trying to keep it well under 2grand all said and done..
 
Possibly 1-2 gigs of the cheapest reliable memory i can get. (maybe more if i can swing it)
Click to expand...

That board requires registered memory, as do most opteron boards (I think there's one that doesn't but it limits what you can do with the memory, might be wrong though.). In all truth don't go cheap on your ram, pay for good reliable ram that will work with the board. It may save you alot of trouble.
 
4gb of ram is probably overkill, but you know your application better than I.

gentoo or suse64 will probably be your best bets for 64 bit, but I'm not sure about NUMA in the kernel at all yet. When it comes, though, it'll be everywhere.

I'd recommend an Enermax 24 pin power supply. I just got one to run my file server, and it's got very stable voltages. About $120.
 
yah i was worried about the memory, figured if it would run non ecc that i would jump on that cheap ass 1gb stick.. but most likely i would have to get 2gb of ecc.


looks like the memory portion needs to be changed to

2gb of Infineon Technologies $272 (2x136)
 
do not skimp on powersupply or ram whatever you do

(the powersupplies that come with cases are rarely decent)
 
basicly im building this server ASAP for one purpose only.. Then once i have more money i will start to "upgrade" it into something more along the lines of what i wish i could get now..

So i will intialy start with onboard video (saves the expense of a vid card), and while nice expensive memory is good to have im not sure i can foot the huge bill for it just yet.

I agree on the power supply, a good one is the foundation of any system..

Got links to any good ones?

i have a few sitting around the house that cost me about 100 bucks or so forgot what brand they were..
 
Yah just trying to figure out what i need to budget first.. haha i will figure i will have to spend another 130 or so on a power supply...


How does this board do with a bit of over clocking? (same with the cpus)

Would i be better off going one step up or down if was going to oc it a bit?
 
Tyan's dont overclock.

I have a K8W (S2885) and the only option to overclock is to increase the speed of the hypertransport links.
You can also alter the memory timings and thats about it.
I would expect the S2882 board to have about the same range of options.

Luck.......:D
 
400+whpwrx said:
yah i was worried about the memory, figured if it would run non ecc that i would jump on that cheap ass 1gb stick.. but most likely i would have to get 2gb of ecc.


looks like the memory portion needs to be changed to

2gb of Infineon Technologies $272 (2x136)
Click to expand...


It doesn't require ECC, it requires registered. Though, usually you can't find registered memory without ECC.
 
I built a similar rig and am very happy with it. I got a PC Power & Cooling supply, and eight sticks of this memory for four gigs.

So i will intialy start with onboard video (saves the expense of a vid card),
Click to expand...

Note that the S2882 doesn't have an AGP slot. If you want different video, your only choice will be a PCI-based card. The S2885 has almost the same architecture, but supports an 8x AGP slot.
 
ECC is known to actually increase performance. In terms of bandwidth that is, not OC'ing ;)
 
Zxcs said:
ECC is known to actually increase performance. In terms of bandwidth that is, not OC'ing ;)
Click to expand...

errm. NO.
http://www.2cpu.com/articles/44_1.html?62901

ECC doesn't have much of a penalty anymore, as the calculations are done by the chipset, and not the CPU, but it still is a slight hit.

If you are talking about the old winbench97 results from ~1998, I would think that it is more a matter of bad benchmark tools, than performance increase from doing more work.

==>Lazn
 
However, there is still a performance hit from Registered RAM
Lazn_Work said:
errm. NO.
http://www.2cpu.com/articles/44_1.html?62901

ECC doesn't have much of a penalty anymore, as the calculations are done by the chipset, and not the CPU, but it still is a slight hit.

If you are talking about the old winbench97 results from ~1998, I would think that it is more a matter of bad benchmark tools, than performance increase from doing more work.

==>Lazn
Click to expand...
 
Is your application SMP aware? Otherwise, you're wasting a lot of money.
 
Good luck...my budget started at around 1500 and is now well over that I will let you try and do the math cause it makes me nauseated thinking about it. I have the following setup and love every minute of it.

Tyan S2895 (K8WE)
2GB OCZ PC3200 ECC Registered Memory
OCZ 600W PS (already had)
LSI U320 SCSI PCI-X (already had)
5- Seagate U320 37GB HDD in Raid0 (for pure speed) (already had)

On the way
-Thermaltake 680W PS (600W is not enough if you are running this much stuff or overclocking..trust me)
-YY cube case for room for two powersupplies
-2x BFG 6800GT OC's PCI-e videocards

This system should be enough for awhile. Spent some cash but isnt that what scholarships you are awarded that you didn't apply for supposed to be used for. I like what the school bought me for my good grades ;) !!!

???
 
Ack! Why would you trust such a high end system to such a terrible power supply? The 600w OCZ supply is much better than any offerering from thermaltake. You should head over to the PSU form and do some reading; Watts don't mean jack.
 
Vertigo Acid said:
Ack! Why would you trust such a high end system to such a terrible power supply? The 600w OCZ supply is much better than any offerering from thermaltake. You should head over to the PSU form and do some reading; Watts don't mean jack.
Click to expand...

That is just a secondary powersupply. It will only power the harddrives and videocards. It will do just fine and if not I will return it and get something else. I didn't say that 680W was the best cause if I was after that I would get 850W PC Power and Cooling powersupply. I am sure it will work to power what I want it to. Thanks for the heads up though!

???
 
Might want to check into the known issues of hard drive corruption and the such when running dual PSUs. I know Ice Czar has some first-hand experience with a similar setup and was killing drives left and right as the result of ground issues
 
Vertigo Acid said:
Might want to check into the known issues of hard drive corruption and the such when running dual PSUs. I know Ice Czar has some first-hand experience with a similar setup and was killing drives left and right as the result of ground issues
Click to expand...

Thanks for the heads-up but numerous people on www.2cpu.com are running them and no one has started to complain about that over there. I plan on doing a relay so I don't have to splice wires and ruin warranties. I will make sure to double check everything and be careful in my design.

???
 
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