Quoting Peter A. H. Peterson: > I know this is a little something of a tall order, but I am looking to > replace my aging SMP system with a dual, dual-core Opteron system > (probably Opteron 265s). Noise level is a primary concern because our > apartment is very small. > >... > > Does anyone have experience with a working dual, dual-core opteron > system that is less than full-tower size and relatively quiet? Or even > a quiet-but-full-tower machine?
So I went with the ASUS K8N-DL motherboard because it is the smallest I could find that had ccNUMA support and good Linux support (SiL SATA and a Broadcom NIC instead of the nVidia nForce Pro 2200 onboards). The board itself is slightly larger than standard ATX with a small tab off to one side with some connectors. The board also features two normal Opteron retention clips, unlike the MSI board. Unfortunately, I have also discovered that the ASUS K8N-DL board does not fit into the Antec Overture II HTPC (home theatre pc) or media center sized case. I couldn't find any documentation about that online so I took a gamble. The placement of the power supply directly blocks the extra "tab" of the motherboard and I don't think there's any good way to mod around it (even if I wanted to). Here are some interesting links on the ASUS K8N-DL: http://www.lostcircuits.com/motherboard/asus_k8n-dl/ http://gentoo-wiki.com/ASUS_K8N-DL_dual_Opteron_motherboard It will not accomodate the horizontal Zalman coolers. I think it might accomodate the vertical coolers, but these are so tall they may not fit well into a HTPC case. I bought the Opterons in a retail bundle so they came with the stock AMD coolers... does anyone have experience with these? Are they either super noisy or poor quality? I didn't realize that my CPUs came with heatsinks so I bought some Antec Performance Coolers: http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID=77099# ...because they would fit into the Overture II case. However, now that I have CPU coolers thanks to AMD, and I may be getting a taller case that could accomodate the Zalman vertical coolers, I may end up returning these. > If anyone has experience with the ZMAX unit and can speak to its noise > level (especially with dual core chips) that would be great too. I decided against the ZMAX (and many other standard ATX boards) because they only have a single memory bank and do not support NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Architecture -- memory for each CPU) and because the general word on the "Shuttle-style" cubes was that they were noisy. > I figured that even if you guys didn't know these pieces of hardware > specifically, the peanut gallery would at least have opinions about > the best way to make a quiet dual dual-opteron server. I'll keep y'all posted. --pedro -- Peter A. H. Peterson, technician and musician. ---=[ http://tastytronic.net/~pedro/ ]=--- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]