Re: Opinion on using AMD Phenom II x6 1090t with Gigabyte 890BPA-UD3H and 8GB DDR-3 as a WebServer.

On 06/30/11 07:43, eculp wrote:
> Quoting Dennis Glatting <dg17_at_penx.com>:
>
>> On Wed, 2011-06-29 at 07:31 -0500, eculp wrote:
>>> I just saw this box that is being promoted as a gaming machine at a
>>> great price and am considering it as a web-server.
>>>
>>> In addition to having no information on the CPU as a server lack of
>>> comfort with 6 cores and memory 8GB of memory that I am having a
>>> problem with.  I am not a gamer but I have always assumed that a
>>> gaming machine needs the most aggressive hardware.  I have also seen
>>> this processor with 12 GB rather than 8 which, in my ignorance sounds
>>> better.
>>>
>>> Any opinions and guidance are appreciated.
>>>
>>
>> I have been moving away from Gigabyte however I do have a similar board:
>>
>>     MB GIGABYTE GA-870A-UD3 RT
>
> This one is GA-890BPA-UD3G that also has RealTek 811D 10/100/1000 Mbit 
> that I doubt will be a limitation.  I'll stick in another card anyway. 
> I also like that has is sata3 and usb 3 so it seems to be up to date.
>
>>
>> My key complaint about Gigabyte is the ReatTek Ethernet chips. Realtek
>> doesn't publish chip specs and therefore the drivers under FreeBSD/Linux
>> are so-so (i.e., they work but not performance optimized and forget
>> about anything but the default MTU).
>>
>> On my board I hate the South Bridge chip, which is useless for RAID.
>>
>> I am also unable to install VMWare ESXi, my last ditch attempt to find a
>> use for my board. There appears to be a hardware incompatibility while
>> installing (i.e., not during the probe sequence, rather after that
>> sequence then onto installation).
>>
> Thanks a lot for your suggestions and point of view.  I'm begining to 
> think that this may be too much machine but comming down doesn't save 
> much so I will probably give it a try.
>
> ed
>>
>>
>>
>
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A gaming machine needs aggressive hardware, yes, but no one *really* 
cares if it freezes up once a month. You get what you pay for mostly, so 
beware of RAM quality, disks, obscure and unfixed BIOS issues, power 
supply woes etc. I'd really recommend running disk redundancy if it's 
going to be a single webserver. I think the AMD Thubans can do ECC, 
right? Might be a good idea for reliability. Especially if you run 
/var/www on a malloc'd md disk.

If you have a few of them in failover, these issues are a bit less, so 
long as they all don't break at once :).

For what it's worth, I have a RealTek 8169 that works great on 
9-current. Never had issues with performance or mtu. VLANs work fine. 
Transfer over CIFs is disk limited at 65mb/s.

Will it be fine? Yes. Will it buildworld pretty fast? Yes. Could it 
leave you "up a creek" at 3 am 2 months after the 1 year warranty 
expires? Yes.

Depends on expectations, of course.

Matt