What's the experience out there with doing 1/2u dedicated servers using P4's?

Have they become competitive with P3's now? Are your customers looking for P4 servers?

We have mostly p3 1u customers with a few AMDs, and are thinking of looking at a P4 rackmount solution, but I'd like some feedback from others that may be doing this.

What motherboards are you using? Power? Ram? Etc.

Thanks!
Tom

I find that there is still a stigma about having too many sites on a box. When potential clients ask, "How many sites to you host on a box" and your answer is, "Only 600, but the Dual P4 boxes could easily handle 1000 small sites". You may not get the sale. But if you use less expensive hardware that is still fast, (dual P3's 1GHZ will fit in a 2u rackmount, with 2GB ram, etc), you will probably get the sale if you are saying "Less than 300 sites per box, and these boxes could easily handle double that".

I just think that big numbers scare potential sales in some instances. :)

Any thoughts on the cooling of a P4? I run one here and the HSF is so tall I couldn't imagine it fitting in a 1U case. 2U yes, but even then I don't know if the flow would be sufficient.

Originally posted by Potsie
Any thoughts on the cooling of a P4?

Actually, We've been sticking with the P3's. They have some nice low profile fans and there seems to be quite a bit more hardware options for them.

Originally posted by Potsie
Any thoughts on the cooling of a P4? I run one here and the HSF is so tall I couldn't imagine it fitting in a 1U case. 2U yes, but even then I don't know if the flow would be sufficient.

Supermicro has a 1U SuperServer rackmount for P4. So, there must be a low profile fan for P4 with sufficient cooling even for a 1U case. Besides, how much hotter is P4 than P3? I can imagine P4 still runs cooler than AMD XP, and you know AMD (even dual) can be used in a good 1U rackmount (Appro for example).

cheers,
:beer:

Originally posted by dektong
... Besides, how much hotter is P4 than P3?

The question is not "how much hotter" but "how much more heat to dissipate".

The PentiumIII generates about 30 watts of heat. The Pentium4 generates about 55 watts of heat, nearly twice as much.

So a single-processor Pentium4 setup generates nearly as much heat as a dual-processor PentiumIII setup.

On the other hand, if you want to see how to fry an egg on your CPU, here's a HOW-TO (http://www.handyscripts.co.uk/trubador_egg.htm) :D

Originally posted by Potsie
Any thoughts on the cooling of a P4? I run one here and the HSF is so tall I couldn't imagine it fitting in a 1U case. 2U yes, but even then I don't know if the flow would be sufficient.

Alpha, Thermaltake and Intel all have special 1U cpu fans.

I'm going to give that supermicro P4 1u a try, I'll let you know how it works out.

tjk