Recomendations for a dual Xeon board

[Jim H]

I'm looking for recomendations on which motherboard I should get. I'm
planning on running dual 2.4 or 2.6Ghz 553fsb Xeons with Windows XP Pro.
I'm a developer and want the dual processors for testing threaded code. I
also run VMWare a lot and the dual processors takes a lot of the noticable
impact of running virtual machines away from the system.

I'm not much of a gamer. I do own a couple of games, but I haven't actually
played them in months.

Here's what I'm basically looking to do:
dual xeon processors
1 Gig of RAM minimum
SATA RAID 0 drives
I have a g-force video card for running dual monitors (Asus Ti-4200) and
plan to reuse that.
I don't need a high end sound system, I just use it for listening to music
while I work (winamp, windows media player...)
single NIC

My current setup: (which I am happy with but it's time to upgrade)
WIN XP Pro (just recently upgraded from W2k Pro after memory and hdd
failure)
dual P3 700
Asus P2B-D
1 Gig mem (max for this board)
4 IDE hard drives (a little over 200Gig)
IDE CDBurner
Asus Ti4200 video card running 2 monitors.
10/100 NIC (100 Base-T network)
Adaptec 2940 SCSI (DVD reader, CDROM, JAZ)
ISA Sound Blaster sound card
Maxtor Ultra ATA/133 PCI running hard drives
mother board IDE running CDBurner

Stability is key for me. I never turn my machines off and I am on a
network. I run SQL Server developers edition locally for software
develpoment (lots of database stuff). I rarely reboot, unless a patch
requires me to or it's been a while (a month or so).

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Jim

 

[Jonathan Eales]

Supermicro make a range of dual CPU motherboards and always seem to come out
well in magazine reviews etc. I've never used them myself, though I did
have a dual Pentium CPU Intergraph workstation a long time ago.

www.supermicro.com is where to find them.

Jonathan

 

[Jim H]

Redundancy is not really a concern. The data is all source code which gets
backed up by another machine and compresses very well so it doesn't take up
a lot of space.

The Space on my workstation is an issue because the software I use takes up
a lot of space and I have some very large files. I run a few VMWare
machines during my testing and they can take up some significant disk space.

I was considering the RAID 0 solutions just to speed up disk reads and
writes. The compilers are fairly disk intensive. They're a lot of small
fles constantly beling loaded and/or changed durig the compiles. Will RAID
not really help that much. I thought with the faster processors and faster
memory that the disk was going to be the biggest bottleneck. What do you
think? I'm not expecting huge gains but I thought it would be noticable.

Questions:
Why does a hardware raid put a higher CPU load on the system than software?
I thought that was the idea behind the hardware solutions. Is there no
benifit to a hardware RAID card than striping the volumes in windows?

Thanks again,
jim

 

[dorothy.bradbury]

Questions:

Why does a hardware raid put a higher CPU load on the system than software?
I thought that was the idea behind the hardware solutions. Is there no
benifit to a hardware RAID card than striping the volumes in windows?

Sorry for the delay in replying, been busy.

Yes it is contrarian:
o H/W Raid *should* be quicker than s/w Raid
o However, most low-end IDE Raid h/w cards are in fact same/slower

Thus you are paying for a h/w solution which gains little:
o No easy rebuild if array damaged
---- ie, auto-rebuild or auto-reboot-&-recovery
o No performance benefit (at cheap IDE) over software
---- probably because of coding & local CPU v P3/P4 CPU

The former of those is the real problem.
Do not underestimate how hard it can be to recover a system,
at least if you have anything time critical re duration to fully-up.

Personally I prefer to not RAID-0 the system disk, but have 3 disks
with 2 for data which are RAID-0 and one for system which is plain.

Mixing system & data disks on RAID-0 either s/w or h/w complicates
the recovery procedure - it's not seamless outside of high-end solutions.

Just something to consider.
Investigate "recovering RAID-0 system disk" for your O/S, and then
decide whether you want a 2-disk RAID-0 or 3-disk System & RAID-0.

Thanks.