Best XEON Chipset

[mikeasa]

I want to put together the best dual P4 Dual XEON server that I can, but I also don't want to pay alot of extra money for a small performance gain.

I am specifically looking at Supermicro boards as these machines are for customers' servers. The question I have is which chipset to use. Until now I have used the Intel E7500 chipset boards in my quotes. I used them over the i860 boards because DDR was WAY cheaper than RAMBUS in large amounts (1-3GB per system, 512MB-1GB per stick). I noticed that there are also some Serverworks chipsets out there (GC-LE, GC-SL, and GC-HE). Does anyone know which chipset is the best performer? Also, does anyone feel that the i860 with RAMBUS is fast enough to justify the cost of the RAM?

 

[dexvx]

Depends on what kind of performance you're talking about. If its raw CPU/memory performance, Serverworks, E7500, i860 wont make much of a difference. But if you're talking I/O performance, than nothing rivals that of Serverworks (Intel's XeonMP use nothing but Serverworks chipsets), with i860 being dead last. The only advantage i860 has right now is that it has an AGP-Pro slot and cheap, whereas the others only have PCI-X + built-in video to my knowledge.

If its a graphics workstation, probably e7500 or perferably i860. If its a database server, e7500 ( <-- slammed for "poor" I/O performance) or perferably a Serverworks Grand Champion. The XeonMP server I'm next to can sustain about 4.8GB /sec of I/O bandwidth, for point of reference. Thats more than the memory bandwidth of PC1066 RDRam.