Continued: Putting together a Lower-Mid End Server

[Arifi Koseoglu]

Hello again, and thanks for all the information. I think I will go for a
single-CPU and IDE or SATA RAID.

New Questions:
1. What is the difference between the 3 P4C800 models? (P4C800 - P4C800
Deluxe - P4C800-E) I could not conclude anything from the specs...
2. Similarly, what is the difference between the P4P800 and P4P800-Deluxe
3. How does the P4R800-V Deluxe Rank amont the ones above?
4. The disks will probably be Seagate ST3160023AS Barracuda 7200.7 if at the
end we go with SATA and not IDE. (and not the Raptors ftom WD due to cost
reasons). Does this justify using SATA or would regular IDE RAID (mirroring)
perform almost the same?

Again, many thanks in advance and cheers,
-arifi

 

[MaH]

P4C800 "E" would IMHO be preferable because of the CSA funktion.
Which keeps the NIC off the IDE-bus.
For example, whem my computer (with said deluxe MB) sends about 50-55 Mb/s
(megabyte, not megabit)
through the NIC CPU utilization stays under 5%.
Deluxe I belive is a fully equipped board whith LOTS of cables and stuff
included.

 

[Arifi Koseoglu]

Thanks from heart to everyone for all the detailed info and patience.

I need two more answers before I stop bothering you all with my questions on
this topic:

The built-in SATA RAID into i875P(P4C800) and i865PE(P4P800):

The overview page
(http://usa.asus.com/products/mb/socket478/p4p800/overview.htm for the
P4P800) on Asus' web site seem to indicate that it supports RAID 0
(striping) and 1 (mirroring).
However the specification pages
(http://usa.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=P4P800&langs=09 for the P4P800) say
that it only supports RAID 0, and on winXP only - which is of no use for me.

What is the truth? Do both of these chipsets provide RAID1 ? If yes, I will
settle for the NON-DELUXE versions and have some extra money to spend
somewhere else (the only choice remaining being to ECC(875) or not to
ECC(865)).

Ant the other question is what does ECC really buy me in real life?

Cheers and many many thanks in advance again,
-arifi

 

[Leythos]

Hey, I got into this thread late, but here is what I suggest:

For about $1800 you can have a Dual Xeon P4 system with 2GB RAM and Dual
250GB SATA drives.

I bought a PC-DL Deluxe board, case, 550W PSU, 2 x 2.4Ghx 533 Xeon P4's,
2 x 1GB RAM, 2 X 250GB SATA drives, cheap video, cheap cd-rom, floppy.

The machine screams - it's running two separate counter-strike dedicated
server games supporting 16 players each, 30+ dedicated FTP connections,
18 web sites (asp, asp.net), and even a couple small MS SQL databases.
I've yet to see the CPU load hit 10% at any time.

I bought all the parts at www.5oclock.com a while ago, and I'm
considering buying a couple more of these systems.