which would you go with? The AMD 1ghz or the Intel 1 Ghz. The main difference being that the AMD comes with 1 gb of Ram instead of 512mb. I've never really used AMD processors for servers before. Does the AMD 1ghz scale as well as the pentium in terms of performance?

cheers

The other difference between them is the setup fee... a very big difference. But I would personally go with the AMD, not because of the setup fee (well partially because of that), but mainly because I've always supported AMD in the past, their processors have been proven to out-perform Intel processors.

And I've recently received some cool stuff from AMD, the resller stuff, like stickers and that... it's REALLY cool... even got an AMD mouse pad :D.

Alan

Go with AMD. They outperform intel, and is cheaper.

There is no reliability issue. With microproessor, they extremely rarely run an instruction incorrectly. As for scalability, unless you are planning to upgrade to dual or quad processor(which only intel support), the one processor won't change a thing. Even if you do, I don't think the motherboard rackshack use support any upgrade, so this won't be an issue.

Peter

There is only one caveat with the AMD though.. if the fan on the cpu dies, your processor literally melts... that said, it should be a rare occurance.. (the intel CPU steps down the Mhz if it detects an overheat situation)

otherwise, AMD has better performance... and is cheaper...

J.

LOL, well for the lower price, there's always got to be a con somewhere.

Alan

Originally posted by jchoong
There is only one caveat with the AMD though.. if the fan on the cpu dies, your processor literally melts... that said, it should be a rare occurance.. (the intel CPU steps down the Mhz if it detects an overheat situation)

otherwise, AMD has better performance... and is cheaper...

J.

You must be thinking of the example from Anandtech.

A few reasons why this should not matter,

1)Fan dropping is extremely rare,
2)Intel or AMD, if the CPU dies, the server is still down, doesn't matter it melts or not.
3)I have a friend who told me he built a Intel 2Gz machine, forgot to put the fan on(or thing like that), and the CPU was on fire, the whole thing has to be replaced, so I don't know who to believe.

In conclusion, AMD is better.

Peter

peter:

on the note of cpu's catching on fire, i'm not up to date on the p4's, but bxboards.com and i believe tomshardware.com both had reviews on the 'catching fire' incidents. I know i saw a clip on bxboards (2 minutes) of what happened in the different circumstances, and the intel's triumphed. You also might want to note that they did it with heatsync's off, and that makes 90% of the difference.

Well, I don't see any reason why my friend would lie to me. And only Intel make 2 Gz back then(a few months ago).

Peter

Peter:

didn't say he was lying to you, just tellin ya what i've seen, i believe it was a p3, not p4, you can check www.bxboards.com, they probably still have the clip in an archive somewhere ^_^

If we were talking about a desktop computer, I'd say AMD all the way but a server is not a desktop computer. Through my experiences in the past, both AMD and Intel have done great, never had a problem, a "melt down" or anything similar. HOwever, absed on what intel does in the p3s, how thei cache works and so forth they actually work better in servers. What people tend to forget is that unlike in a esktop machine, a server runs the same things over and over again. Intel's chipset does a great job of helping to minimize load with its cache, where as amd goes for pure Mhz power which is not as esential in a server.

That's my experience and my thought on the matter.

Originally posted by TedS
If we were talking about a desktop computer, I'd say AMD all the way but a server is not a desktop computer. Through my experiences in the past, both AMD and Intel have done great, never had a problem, a "melt down" or anything similar. HOwever, absed on what intel does in the p3s, how thei cache works and so forth they actually work better in servers. What people tend to forget is that unlike in a esktop machine, a server runs the same things over and over again. Intel's chipset does a great job of helping to minimize load with its cache, where as amd goes for pure Mhz power which is not as esential in a server.

That's my experience and my thought on the matter.

I don't know too much about processor. However, it has always been that intel leads the clock frequency, while AMD performs better by doing more in one clock tick. Also, traditionally, AMD processors have larger cache.

Peter

They do traditionally have larger caches but not in the case of the Duron (rackshack's current choice). The Durons have smaller caches then the P 3's because it was originally created to compete with Celerons in the low-end market.

We can only wish rackshack will offer tbirds or xp proccesors instead of the duron which is a 100mhz bus, and has a small cache.

1)Fan dropping is extremely rare

I don't think fans dying is that rare. I've had two fans die in 8 years, and I've only had 7 CPU's in that timeframe (3 dual CPU systems.) CPU's were fine, but once when the fan started to slow down to a craw, the system became unstable and was crashed in the morning when I found it and heard the noise the fan was making. Also I doubt that the $300 white box machines have high-end fans - probably $10 genenic fans which are more prone to failure than a high end CPU fan an enthuiast might buy.

I just got the specifics on the cache sizes,

P3 1 ghz: L2 Cache of 256 KB
Tbird 1 ghz: 256 KB
Duron 1 ghz: 64 KB

P3 1 ghz: L1 cache 32 KB
Athlon+Duron: L1 Cache of 128 Kb

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1261&p=2

So basically the duron that rackshack uses has 1/4th the L2 cache that the P3 has but the duron also has a 4x larger L1 cache.

Any hardware Guru's know which is important for most httpd servers?

Fans dying uncommon?

Are you out of your minds? Fans are the most common thing to die, I find myself typically adding oil to mine every 6 to 12 months. Perhaps it's because my pc's are all in carpeted rooms and we have 3 cats? Dust and heat will soak up what little lubricating oil your cpu fan has in no time.

True, but I hope rackshack doesnt have cats or carpet in their datacenter....

All fans are not equal :). I personally never had to bother with fans and some of my oldest pcs that have been running constantly (with some restarts and hardware/os changes) for five years with tons of dust. Dust that's accumulated in most of my machines are by no means small but it hasn't posed a problem for me yet and i'm to lazy to get something to safely remove it.

Safely remove the dust?

Why bother? just breathe in, and blow really hard, re-distributing it around the room. Thats what I do, realistically extremely ineffective, but who wants to go through all the effort of lugging down a vaccum cleaner and all the attachments just to suck up some dust.

You can always try dry swiffer cloths, I'm not sure if they'd work (dont try the wet ones, I made that mistake once, nasty and sticky!)

Blow using my mouth, LOL... I was thinking of buying cannisters filled with compressed air created for this purpose.

If i tried to blow it might be as bad as the wet towel...

Compressed air? Too expensive for my blood, that stuff is ~$10/can and it just screams "PLAY WITH ME!". I find that stuff goes in no time and does the same thing your mouth does, redistrbutes the dust around the room.

If you want a serious solution to dust problems (what i would recommend for data facilities, etc.) is a shopvac. The shopvac I used to have had a reverse mode where it turned into a mini leaf-blower, fairly strong, and detached from the unit so you weren't spraying it with whatever it had picked up. It might be a tad strong, but if you hold it 1 foot away or so, it should clean out the tower/case quite quickly without damaging anything.

(i will not be held liable for anyone who goes, gets a heavy duty leafblower and uh... you can use your imagination at what would happen =)

You can usually find great deals on Dust-Off brand compressed air 3 packs from costco (http://www.costco.com) but not sure they offer it for online purchases.