Forum OpenACS Q&A: Development machine recommendations sought...

Two years ago, on a recommendation, I based my machine on a SuperMicro
P6DBE motherboard.  Boy was that a recommendation I have learned to
love over the years.  It's been a rock solid machine from day one, and
if it had a 133 Mhz bus and supported much faster CPUs, I would be
upgrading it today.

So what's a reasonably wonderful motherboard and CPU combination these
days?  I am looking to piece together a machine for say 2K.  I value
good (not necessarily great) performance, stability, and support.  I
would like a motherboard that enables upgrades to technology expected
down the road.  As an example, the machine I bought two years ago, I
filled with two 500Mhz CPUs.  I recall at the time, 700 or 800Mhz CPUs
were the very expensive top end, and two 500Mhz CPUs could be had for
much less than one 800Mhz CPU.

This machine should be well qualified for running Linux, Windows, and
VMWare.

Secondarily, what's the name of a good hardware reseller with
reasonable return policies and knowledgable techs?

As an alternative, I could actually upgrade this board to two 800Mhz
CPUs of the 100Mhz bus flavor.  It appears such an upgrade of CPUs
would be about $300.  A very nicely priced upgrade.  Aside from just
raw HP, is there any real value in a two year newer system?

Thank you,

Actually, the raw CPU speed may not matter as much as the higher memory bandwidth of DDR RAM, which would serve to make everything faster overall.  I think that PC2100 DDR gets you about 1.4GB/second of memory bandwidth - pretty zippy.

That's what I do, and it works great on an 800 MHz laptop. Of course, you probably want to load it with around 512 MB RAM, but you would anyway, wouldn't you? :)

http://pinds.com/software/virtual-development-server

I've been toying with the idea of a laptop for a developmental machine. Sure, it wouldn't have the horsepower, especially the disk speed, but wouldn't it be a joy to work on projects in a coffee shop,

You're right, about the only thing I can think of that would be better, would be to work on my projects from "the airport cafe" overlooking the tarmac, or else to work on my projects from a van or something perched along Highway 1 one week, parked in a Tahoe ski resort the next week, and maybe even, parked down in the Guaymas harbor the following week.

Sigh, but that just has to be a fantasy, right?

I usually judge speed by Emacs keystrokes, project compiles, and mandatory Windows reboots. Don, I think you're right, there's a good chance that adding modern SCSI drives to my current machine is the best bang for the buck.

Any reason I shouldn't do this for my developmental computer? It seems like once Postgres and Aolserver are installed, there shouldn't be any difference, right? CVS should play well with Linux, shouldn't it? Anything I should be worried about?

Side benefit for OACS community: I can help maintain and test the OS X install docs. :)

I shuffled through a number of boards for my primary box, after UPS gave me the impetus by destroying my machine. I've settled on Epox - Tyan & ABit are as stable, but Epox gave me more on-board; maybe you'll see differently. Those VIA KT266A chipsets are nice, but I'm still leery of VIA after their DMA bug last year that trashed data. SiS opened up something cool with the 735; keep an eye on them.

Go with Athlons for CPUs -- they're 60% the price of P4s, clock for clock, and have a higher instruction dispatch per clock (AMD hired big chunks of the Alpha team after DEC went to Compaq). And more importantly for upgrade paths, AMD keeps the pinouts and electrical standards longer than Intel. Lately it seems like Intel intends for every upgrade to involve trashing both CPU and mainboard.

Buy SCSCI drives, cover them with fans. Almost every hardware failure of mine has been heat problems on drives.

Buy ATI for video if you dislike monkeying around with your kernel. Not that monkeying with kernels is bad (or I would have a big problem), but 'monkeying' usually entails 'distros do not include it'. My debian machine is riddled with little hand-configs and monkeyjobs I have done on it to do things not in the distro -- NVidia is one of those things.

As for a hardware reseller who isn't a pain in the ass, I'm having good luck with newegg.com. I haven't tried anything in terms of support or techs, though. I don't think they do that. For full machines, Talli mentions Penguin Computers. I've only worked with their rackmounts, but those were some very nice machines, for very cheap considering the competition. Might be worth looking at.

As for your last line (new CPUs)..... $300 can buy you a new motherboard and Athlon XP. Then reuse all your cards & such. But junk that 100Mhz fossil.

As I hinted in my response to Jade (we've drunk beer together, once over my laptop) I do work much of the time on my laptop.

But ... you still can't beat a machine with decent drives, ECC (for stability, my laptop has occassional mysterious Oracle problems that I don't see anywhere else, and I suspect the lack of error correction, and besides, I'm an old-fashioned old-fart).

Via's popular chipset for Athlon has tested out to be great, but I'm guessing Jerry's an SMP kinda guy.  There's something cool about dual processor machines, though my only one is my webserver (which is vastly underutilized but which I love anyway).

I suspect Jerry's into the cool factor, as I would be, even though he agreed with my assessment that switching to 15K RPM SCSI would be the most cost-effective thing to do (for me, that has high coolness factor since I'm running 7200 and 5400 RPM ATA and SCSI drives).

DDR and RDRAM have been shown to provide surprisingly little performance improvement over SDRAM alternatives for most applications.  You need to be doing a lot of memory shuffling and little computation.

Meanwhile Oracle is doing directly buffer-to-disk I/O bypassing the kernel buffer cache (at least Linux 2.4 has this feature) which diminishes the improvement in Oracle performance you can get with higher speed memory.  In PG, increasing the buffer cache to reasonable levels means you'll reduce shuffling, too.

So ... it's not clear in practice how much better DDR will perform than SDRAM for the kind of systems we deal with.

Better, obviously, but the "bang for buck" issue isn't clear.

I do agree with the comment that Intel's forcing a lot of mobo and memory rebuys.  I don't see it as being intentional, rather I see it as being a result of reactionary responses to the totally unexpected (by Intel and frankly everyone else) ability of AMD to not only challenge Intel on price/performance, but on raw performance.  About two years ago Intel was thrown into a tizzy by the Athlon and (worse, from their POV) the roadmap, and realized that their slowdown on incremental improvements in order to concentrate on a far-off "next generation" left them vulnerable.  So ... scramble, scramble, scramble and at the same time the rate of incompatible upgrades were accelerated.  Most consumers don't upgrade, after all ... they buy a new box.  And more importantly Intel had no choice from an engineering point of view.

<p>Too bad. The TiBook is really sweet, and you can use VPC to
run Windows on it.</p>

Sounds like you've got a good system started, if you don't mind could you please pass along the model of the motherboard and processors you chose. Also the source you used would be appreciated.

While I know systems integration and software, I must admit I'm a little weak on hardware specs.

Thnaks,

can you say the reason, why it was not possible to develope a new processesor(more than 3.2Ghz speed) without dual architecture?

please send the reason to my e-mail id: mailto:mails4jose@yahoo.com

thank you sir.

-leo