Motherboard Suggestions

[Daniel Mons]

I'm a huge AMD fan, but last year left me with no choice but to jump to
Intel.  Why?  Motherboards.

I was put in charge of decking out a small startup visual effects
studio.  About a dozen decently-specced workstations, and a dozen render
nodes for their cluster, and a couple of file and DNS/LDAP/Samba
servers.  The whole lot were to run Kubuntu 7.04 for the company's first
major film project (and new machines later on migrated across to 7.10).

The first few systems were AMD Athlon64 X2 chips running on Nvidia
hardware.  All sorts of problems ensued.  Nvidia MCP chipsets gave us
all sorts of grief.  Everything from SATA controllers soft-resetting
under very high load to onboard Marvell Yukon network chipsets dropping
80% of packets (both known bugs, and depending who you ask the fault
lies either with Nvidia/Marvell or the Linux kernel devs).  It seems
that there's very little else on the market for AMD chips at the moment.
 VIA boards have all but disappeared, and AMD's own chipsets are rare as
hen's teeth.

A few of the problems were fixed with upgraded kernels and BIOS
upgrades, but on the whole things were unreliable at best.  We ended up
needing to purchase plug in NICs and SATA controllers in certain
workstations to get by.  Frustrating to say the least (particularly if
we had to drop back to PCI gigabit NICs, which are bandwidth limited
compared to PCI-Express connected onboard NICs).

After the first few systems we buckled and went with Intel.  Asides from
being the first to market with Quad core CPUs, as long as we stuck with
boards with either genuine Intel NICs or the P35's with the Attansic
NICs on board everything was OK.  (Marvell Yukon cards are still an
issue).  Attansic NICs need at least a 2.6.22 kernel, which means either
compiling your own into Feisty, or using Gutsy.

At the end of the day, despite my personal preference for AMD's better
bandwidth and better float performance, Intel turned out to be a better
fit for Linux compatibility and processor density (Intel Quad core
processors were far less than double the price of AMD Dual cores, which
meant more processing per node).

Talking video cards, Nvidia was the winner.  Despite still needing
non-free binary drivers (my personal preference is always for free
software, but 3D performance was crucial), Nvidia proved to have better
performance and stability under high load than ATi.

So that was 2007 in a nutshell for me when deciding between AMD and
Intel.  Ironically it had little to do with either CPU, but more to do
with the supporting motherboards, and the supplied onboard components.
If Nvidia and Marvell could get their combined act together and assist
the kernel developers to fix the last few remaining bugs, the platforms
would be super performers.  Sadly it's little things like these that
scare myself and my clients away from a brand for 2-3 years until we
have the spare time to go through another phase of R&D and purchasing.

-Dan



Leslie Gossner wrote:
> Any reason you dont want to go with an Intel?  personally id recommend a
> C2D E4500 on an ASUS P5K-SE as a good cheap yet powerful system. 
> Anything based on an Intel chipset is usually a safe bet for *nix
> compatibility and Nvidia for the video card is another safe bet.  I dont
> know a great deal about AMD chipsets so i wont go there.  I have
> everything from a 965 chipset to a P35 chipset and they work out of the
> box. If you want to go extra extra budget and E2140 will save you around
> $100 over the E4500 but you do sacrifice a bit of speed to do that.
> Just a bit of a brainstorm here but you may be a huge AMD fan so i wont
> go too far into it.
> Leslie
> P.S My local PC store does an E4500 system for under $600 so they are
> dirt cheap.
> 
> remangan at gmail.com wrote:
>> Did you want to build one or did you want to buy a mass-produced
>> computer from a department store?
>>
>>
>>
>> On 11/01/2008, *Todd* < todd at nodaleks.com <mailto:todd at nodaleks.com>>
>> wrote:
>>
>>     Hi
>>
>>     I am thinking of purchasing a new computer, something that Ubuntu
>>     will
>>     work with "out of the box".  Could any one give me some suggestions to
>>     what would be a Ubuntu friendly motherboard that is readily available
>>     online and a suitable AMD CPU to match. I am looking at the budget
>>     end
>>     of the the market. I was intending also to purchase a N Vidia Ge Force
>>     8500 GT as well as my present ATI card has driven me over the
>>     edge. Any
>>     comments and suggestion would be most welcome thanks.
>>
>>     Cheers
>>     Todd
>>
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