I haven't built a system from scratch myself in about five years, so don't flame the newbie.
I want to set up one or two servers and a workstation, together in a small rack cabinet. Some totally basic questions:- * I've seen standoffs to turn pci slots sideways for rackmounts. Is there an AGP equivalent, or is that connector too complex/touchy to build a standoff? I was hoping to fit my workstation into 2U or 3U.
* I want to try Athlon/Duron setups instead of Intel, mostly out of a desire to support the underdog than for anything else. Workstation will be probably dual boot Win2K and RedHat. Server or servers will be RedHat. Need I tailor my motherboards to the purpose, or are there good general mobos that will cover both workstation and low-to-medium traffic servers okay? Not talking overclocking, but well-rounded 24/7 running.
* I want to stick to one type of memory, say, SDRAM PC100 or PC133 because it's easy to find it on pricewatch and I can mix and match between systems. In terms of chipsets for Athlon/Duron, is this a mistake? What are the real performance gains by the more complicated memory types?
* I don't yet know much about the ATA/66 vs other hard drive issues. If I want to add hard drives as I grow, without killing speed due to shared hard drive buses, what do I need to know?
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