Hey, what do you guys think of the VIA Samuel2 1 Giga Pro processor 's? What if a dedicated host offered one of those? Would you be interested if it was cheap? Have any of you used these?

no idea..... all I found that it's built-in Socket-370 processor (on some Via motherboards). VIA acquired Cyrix processor business I guess. Probably low-end, but not that good for server market...

i haven't seen many offers with them, however, i'd be interested to see some in action and see how they hold up.

i've liked some VIA desktops i've seen and if the performance is there, for the cost, you're looking at a pretty good setup for some low-power servers. definitely help out with costs and i thought i had heard that VIA had a pretty good warranty.


i mean, if people can still run servers on old pentiums and celerons, i would imagine the new VIA chips would workout pretty well for the low cost.

yeah, thats why i am asking, i saw them, and i could build a couple...but i was trying to see if anyone would buy em... maybe like a secondary mail server, i dunno, it would be cheap... sub $100/mo marker...

oh yeah, they look great. i hear they run very cool also compared to AMD and intel. definitely think they'd be well suited for the lower-power sub-100 market. maybe even the sub-75 market. :)

are you saying you would you buy one? :)

heh, i'd most certainly like to see them offered. i'm not in the market at the moment, but, i do think it would lead to a well-rounded product offering for any company offering dedicated servers.

also, in the past year i've seen alot of talk on WHT of people needing/wanting low-power dedicated servers that are good quality yet, low on cost as well. to handle tasks such as DNS, mail, etc. or, people like me who only have a dedicated box to learn / host a few large sites and are not really interested in high proc power nor being in the hosting business.

possibly a somewhat-profitable (notice the somewhat) way of competing with united.colos $49 box (if you're inclined to do so)

I've seen a couple companies offering shoe box style systems with VIA processors in them that are aimed at the small business fileserver market. Huge disks (120GB) and 800Mhz processor with pretty much barebones systems otherwise. Not even a video card, you have to serial or telnet in. Might be interesting if a company came up with a 1U box based around the 800Mhz to 1Ghz range processor. It's probably be perfect for DNS, mail, and mySQL databases.

with 64K L2 cache, the load average should jump to 5 with no problems. :)

does anyone have one of the VIA proc servers that FDC used to offer?

It's important to keep in mind that the cpu is one of the cheapest components of a server, so the savings from skimping on it are not that great.

For example, you can get an Athlon 1600+ for about 65 including heatsink. A Duron runs as low as about $30, not including heatsink.

For a budget server, your savings aren't going to be more than about $50 (and probably less) upfront.


Server configuration A:

$150 - 1u case
$110 - Athlon 1600+ w/ heatsink and cheap mobo or Celeron 1.7 w/ same
$55 PC133 RAM
$70 - decent hard drive
$40 - video card, lan card, riser card, cables, etc.

Total: $425

If you substitute the Via processor, it'll save you $60 at the most, right? This brings the total down to $365.

At this price point, you're going to be better off buying a Dell mini tower server, if you have room for it. But seriously, how much should a $60 difference in server cost affect the monthly charge? I don't know how dedicated server providers calculate this sort of thing, but it seems to me that perhaps it would be reasonable to pay off the server in 12 months, which equates to a $5 per month difference in cost for the Via system.

$365 is a dollar a day for a year. $425 is less than $1.17 a day. So you're looking at about $30 - $35 a month to pay off the server in a year, not including bandwidth, power, etc.

Originally posted by atr
It's important to keep in mind that the cpu is one of the cheapest components of a server, so the savings from skimping on it are not that great.

For example, you can get an Athlon 1600+ for about 65 including heatsink. A Duron runs as low as about $30, not including heatsink.

For a budget server, your savings aren't going to be more than about $50 (and probably less) upfront.


Server configuration A:

$150 - 1u case
$110 - Athlon 1600+ w/ heatsink and cheap mobo or Celeron 1.7 w/ same
$55 PC133 RAM
$70 - decent hard drive
$40 - video card, lan card, riser card, cables, etc.

Total: $425

If you substitute the Via processor, it'll save you $60 at the most, right? This brings the total down to $365.

At this price point, you're going to be better off buying a Dell mini tower server, if you have room for it. But seriously, how much should a $60 difference in server cost affect the monthly charge? I don't know how dedicated server providers calculate this sort of thing, but it seems to me that perhaps it would be reasonable to pay off the server in 12 months, which equates to a $5 per month difference in cost for the Via system.

$365 is a dollar a day for a year. $425 is less than $1.17 a day. So you're looking at about $30 - $35 a month to pay off the server in a year, not including bandwidth, power, etc.


i was thinking more along the lines of this...

$74 - via 733 + mobo
$40 - 512 meg pc 133
$55 - 40 gig wd
$32 - book pc case

$201....

I can fit 5 of them on their sides in just shy of 9u, and my racks are deep enought o go 2 deep...

this would be like a $60-$80/mo sort of server

That's the thing, VIA processors are ment for extreme integration. Most of their processors are system-on-a-chip, thus everything is done in three or four chip chipsets instead of ten to twenty. Thus a savings of $100 to $150 could easily be seen. Put it in a custom built 1U case, like the Cobalt case, and you've got say a $200 1U, brand new server. A system that would be perfect for low processor intensive things or a cluster setup where you just need a lot of systems to through at a problem, but they don't need to be even middle of the road systems.

DNS farm, mail cluster, MRTG server, monitoring server, etc.

I don't think the VIA c3 processor would be good for a server. I wouldn't be really crazy about using one at home for personal use.

Sound quite interesting. Maybe it would suit the sort of person who has like one fairly popular site opposed to webhosts?

the cpu cache would be the primary concern here, imho.

why not set one up and start some testing haxor!? :)

Originally posted by The Laughing Cow
Sound quite interesting. Maybe it would suit the sort of person who has like one fairly popular site opposed to webhosts?

I wouldn't use it for PHP or ASP based sites. It would be perfect for static HTML sites, and maybe serving out audio files, but for anything that requires a bit of oommph in the processing it would probably not be the best.

But again, for a DNS or mail server, it would be perfect.

Originally posted by skylab
does anyone have one of the VIA proc servers that FDC used to offer?

really depends what you want to do with the server

Pros:
small size
power efficient
inexpencive
works fine with win2k
works fine with redhat 7.2 and 7.3

cons:
not upgradable
the one PCI slot it has is practicaly not usable
network card is very unstable
crashes with FreeBSD like 10 times a day


we have about 20 of those running with 700 and 900 mhz cpus. They are quite nice , especially when you get them with those ITX cases but I wouldn`t use them in larger quantites cause I think there are still bugs that need to be fixed