RE: motherboad for desktop
> From: Francesco Pietra [mailto:chiendarret@gmail.com]
> Sent: Sunday, August 23, 2009 9:02 AM
>
> Hi:
> My old K7S5A (SiS735 chipset) Athlon i386 lenny desktop has died and I
> am wondering how to set up a new one for the same service (running
> 32bit graphic scientific programs, besides office use, and
> establishing scp connection with my amd64 computing machines).
> Absolutely no need of multicore, rather, a single fast processor would
> be of use for scientific purposes as parallelized codes are rare
> stuff. I thought to by a second hand single-processor motherboard but
> it might result as a bad jump into the past. Also, I have a couple of
> unused 150GB Raptor WD HDs that could only be used if nthe motherboard
> has SATA connections (better two, so as to set up a RAID1).
>
> Any suggestion on which motherboard (or motherboard type if you prefer
> to be uncommittal about brand) would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks
>
> francesco pietra
If you want a fast, single-core processor, the Pentium 4 3.8 GHz can be
found on eBay. It uses a LGA775 socket, so the motherboard can be upgraded
to a Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad (but not Core i7) in the future, if the
programs you run ever get upgraded to take advantage of multiple cores, or
if you want to run multiple sing-threaded programs concurrently.
Once you decide on the socket type (in this case LGA775), then it just comes
down to what other features you want on a motherboard, and buying one from
one of the major brands (Asus, Gigabyte, etc) that matches your feature list
and budget.
Any LGA775 board you buy will have multiple SATA connectors on it. They
usually have fake RAID, but I don't recommend you use it. Instead, use
Linux software RAID.
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