Re: quiet dual dual-core opteron
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/ ]=---
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