Hi,
I'm building a database server here that will be extremely heavily loaded (think roughly 50 connections per second at the moment and doubling every few months). I wanted to give the box at least 2GB memory (maybe 4GB) because our current database box (dual P3 733 with 1GB PC133 ram (ye old MSI MS-6321)) just doesn't cut it anymore.
The logical thing to do is a dual Athlon system but since the 760MP boards only support DDR and 512MB DDR modules are completely unaffordable at the moment this is somewhat out of the question. My next step was to look into a single Athlon system since I am very statisfied with one of our newer webservers running on the KT133A chipset with PC133. But it turns out KT133A boards only support 1.5GB RAM...
Pentium 4 boards don't seem to be much of an alternative. I haven't seen any RIMM's bigger than 256MB and only the dual-Xeon Iwill DX400-SN has 8 RIMM slots but doesn't seem to be on the market yet (and most certainly not available in the Netherlands where I live and have to get all the parts).
So the only solution seems to be the trusty old Pentium III, a nice board based on a ServerWorks chipset for example. The only problem I have with this is that the box wil be heavily limited by memory bandwidth and the Pentium III isn't exactly famous for it's great performance in that area. Sure, chipsets like the ServerWorks III HEsl help a lot with their high bandwidth architecture but that doesn't mean it can compete with the likes of Xeon and dual Athlon systems.
Obviously I don't give a rats ass about things like graphics performance (my current favourite server videocard is an 8mb ATI PCI card ), on-board video is actually a big plus in my book, etc. The box will run Debian Linux and will be outfitted with a nice big u2w scsi raid-5 array etc, and money is not really a problem as long as it's reasonable ($1000 for a scsi controller is reasonable, but $1000 for a 512mb DDR RAM module is definitely not).
So, which motherboard and CPU(s) do you guys think I should go for?
I'm building a database server here that will be extremely heavily loaded (think roughly 50 connections per second at the moment and doubling every few months). I wanted to give the box at least 2GB memory (maybe 4GB) because our current database box (dual P3 733 with 1GB PC133 ram (ye old MSI MS-6321)) just doesn't cut it anymore.
The logical thing to do is a dual Athlon system but since the 760MP boards only support DDR and 512MB DDR modules are completely unaffordable at the moment this is somewhat out of the question. My next step was to look into a single Athlon system since I am very statisfied with one of our newer webservers running on the KT133A chipset with PC133. But it turns out KT133A boards only support 1.5GB RAM...
Pentium 4 boards don't seem to be much of an alternative. I haven't seen any RIMM's bigger than 256MB and only the dual-Xeon Iwill DX400-SN has 8 RIMM slots but doesn't seem to be on the market yet (and most certainly not available in the Netherlands where I live and have to get all the parts).
So the only solution seems to be the trusty old Pentium III, a nice board based on a ServerWorks chipset for example. The only problem I have with this is that the box wil be heavily limited by memory bandwidth and the Pentium III isn't exactly famous for it's great performance in that area. Sure, chipsets like the ServerWorks III HEsl help a lot with their high bandwidth architecture but that doesn't mean it can compete with the likes of Xeon and dual Athlon systems.
Obviously I don't give a rats ass about things like graphics performance (my current favourite server videocard is an 8mb ATI PCI card ), on-board video is actually a big plus in my book, etc. The box will run Debian Linux and will be outfitted with a nice big u2w scsi raid-5 array etc, and money is not really a problem as long as it's reasonable ($1000 for a scsi controller is reasonable, but $1000 for a 512mb DDR RAM module is definitely not).
So, which motherboard and CPU(s) do you guys think I should go for?