Scientific Linux (RHEL 4)
AMD 4400+ x2 Athlon 64 (dual core, 2MB L2)
Abit nf-95 motherboard (cheapest socket 939 board at the time)
2GB RAM, DDR 400
200GB SATA hard drive
integrated graphics, sound, 10/100 LAN
all my pennies are paper-thin: this actually seems fairly generous,
at least in cpu and disk - perhaps too thin in networking.
Earlier this summer, the case fan on one of the machines failed, and the
result seems like a cooked motherboard (erratic errors with the integrated
NIC). The question I'm asking the list is the following: In a university
setting I can't just ebay off the old parts and buy a new node. Thus I'm
limited presently to looking for a motherboard with AMD's socket 939 and a
few SATA2 ports - everything else is up for grabs. Is it worth my time (and
funds) to buy a motherboard in the $200 range (ie something like a tyan
s2866g3nr), or should I again go with the cheapest thing there is (something
like an Asus a8v-xe in the $50 range).
this is a low-end cluster (pardon me for saying so!), and I think it
should use low-end components. sticking in a serverish, ECC-capable,
SLI-toting MB doesn't make much sense, considering that the $150 saved
would go a long way towards adding another (updated) node...
I don't really understand the distinction between these two groups of
hardware. The tyan is probably a bad example because it has 3 network
ports, but aside from this, they seem like basically the same board. I'd
appreciate advice on putting together a decent machine.
I would stick to NVidia and ATI chipsets in this category, but I don't
think it makes much difference which brand you get. I probably _would_
choose a board with no MB-fan, with gigabit, with monitoring of the
cpu and case fans ;)
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