AMD or Intel?

[Freddie Cash]

On Mon, September 10, 2007 11:46 am, Martin Cracauer wrote:
> On the other hand, if you want K8 or K10 in a modern SMP mainboard you
> have to live with NVidia for chipsets, and the socket F boards all have
> the MPC55 SATA controller, which iirc is unsupported by both BSD and
> Linux.  MPC65 moved to AHCI so all is well - but there are no
> socket F boards with that SATA controller.

Depending on what you consider "modern SMP" to mean, you can use
dual-core Opterons in the Tyan Thunder K8SD-Pro (S2882) motherboard.

This is a dual-socket 940 motherboard that uses the AMD-8111 chipset. 
All devices on the motherboard are fully supported by FreeBSD 6.2.  It
supports 4 GB DIMMS with 8 slots, for a total of 32 GB of RAM.  For i386
setups, the BIOS can be configured to properly map around the "PCI memory
hole".  The onboard SATA controller is a crappy SiI, but there is an
option to get it with an onboard Adaptec U320 SCSI controller
(dual-channel).  We use 3Ware 9550SX RAID controllers instead.  There are
several 32-bit/33 MHz PCI slots, a pair of 64-bit/33 MHz PCI-X slots, and
a pair of 64-bit/133-MHZ PCI-X slots.  The management daughter card works
well as a serial console for FreeBSD.

Only $450 CDN for the motherboard, and it's still available.  We have
over a 100 of these in service throughout the district doing file/print,
xterminal (diskless), xterminal (thin-client), router, database, web,
VMWare hosts, Xen hosts, and more.  Hardy little things.

These probably aren't the fastest motherboard on the block, and they only
use DDR1 RAM, but they are fully supported under FreeBSD 6.x, Debian
Linux 4.x, and Ubuntu Linux 7.04 (the only OSes we've tested).

----
Freddie Cash, LPIC-2 CCNT CCLP        Helpdesk / Network Support Tech.
School District 73                    (250) 377-HELP [377-4357]
fcash at sd73.bc.ca                      helpdesk at sd73.bc.ca