Building server for a high school

[Blueknightntn]

I am looking to build a high end server for my high school, and I was wondering what the best board for supporting dual pentium 4s, high bus speeds, ddrram(lots of expansion), and lots of pci slots with two agp busses. any suggestions?

 

[tomrizzo]

If this server is mission-critical, should you really need a mobo that can support high bus-speeds. Won't need to overclock if that is the case.

 

[tomrizzo]

Check out this link to 2cpu.com. You might find what you are looking for there.

 

[vash]

<< I am looking to build a high end server for my high school, and I was wondering what the best board for supporting dual pentium 4s, high bus speeds, ddrram(lots of expansion), and lots of pci slots with two agp busses. any suggestions? >>

Sounds like you want a board that doesn't exist anywhere (short of some engineering boards). Dual Pentium4 board will come in the flavor of Xeon related boards and not standard P4 boards. Also, 2x AGP slots? That's not available on any motherboard that I know of (heck, most server boards don't have an AGP Pro slots, servers don't need fast GUIs).

Look at boards from Serverworks, they have dually boards for Xeon's, but they aren't cheap (all good server boards aren't). Getting a dual P3 would be easier, somewhat less expensive, and would definitely serve all server related goodies (http, ftp, domain auth, dns, wins, gateway, etc).

vash

 

[Dundain]

Dual Pent 4 boards? Good luck, you might find one in a couple of months. Supposadly ServerWorks has the closest chipset to actually being ready for use with the Pentium 4 but I wouldnt want to use it for a server anyways. And yes I know Asus supposadly has a board but read HardOCPs comment...Asus doesnt even know that exists. Also, you dont need AGP buses on a server, you barely need PCi video and you cant get dual AGP secondly.

Finally, your probably going to better off just purcashing a server from one of the big companies like IBM, Dell, Compaq or whoever you go with. You'll get 24/7 support and most likely be able to do it for cheaper (in the end run) than you could yourself. Next time, try and give a little more specs of what you need, for what type of mission, how much, etc. It'll help people answer more. Also, post this in the Network forum...fits more there.

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

I agree with Dundain here. Something that comes with full support is the best way to go IMO. Dual P4 servers don't exist, and dual Xeons are too pricey IMO. You don't need dual AGP for a server. Onboard GFX should be fine. I think a dual Tualatin server would meet your needs, support the amount of RAM you require and run well in a rack. What tasks will this server be handling anyway? I'm guessing you just want a glorified fileserver...

 

[jcmkk]

What school would actually let a student build a server for them? Buy one from a big manufacturer like has been said before. If you are actually gonna build one yourself, then you may want to look at some AMD dualies. What is your school gonna do after you graduate and can't give them technical support anyway?

 

[Hittman]

I agree that a name brand server is a better alternative, especially when uptime is critical, due to the maintenance contracts and warranties available. If you are set on building, I also recommend Supermicro boards. A nice Supermicro board and a couple Tualatins will do about anything that you will throw at it.

In regards to AGP, skip it or at the very least purchase an older video card with native windows support. The last thing you need on a server is instability caused by something as petty as third party video drivers.

As for overclocking, I am of the opinion that you should never overclock a business machine of any type. The performance increase is not worth the potential instability.

 

[reicherb]

Buy a Compaq server. We use the ML series in our schools because they offer decent performance for a reasonable price.

 

[halik]

hehe you dont have an idea what a server is, do you

what you want is dual p3, xeon if you wanna afford it. Forget AGP, you wont even need a videocard really. You dont need ddr ram at all, just get lots of normal sdram. And most importantly SCSI!

 

[DSTA]

I think the best way to start this is to figure out what the thing will have to be doing. The motherboard is not really important untill you know roughly how much horsepower you need, how long the machine will have to last before the school can afford a new one etc.

The folks that say "buy one off the shelf" are right of course, makes a lot of sense if downtime is a concern. But on the other hand building that server could be a fun school project.

 

[lastig21]

A professor at my school had a couple of dual p4 xeons built for workstations :disgust: I can't remember what type of board they went with, but I know it had issues with the power supply. They had to order a power supply that was designed for that board. After watching the guy put it together (who shouldn't have been anywhere near a computer that expensive), I would also suggest purchasing the server from a big name. Our guy couldn't figure out the heatsink clips and ended up drilling some holes in the hs to get it to fit - like i said, he shouldn't have been anywhere near a computer.

 

[jose]

Go to dell.com and browse their small business section.

They have some relative inexpensive dual serverworks based dual P3's systems.

Also don't forget to configure it w/ 5-6 drives in a raid 5 configuration. And don't forget to
get a tape drive.

Jose

 

[kyle1745]

Ya check out Dell they were running a deal on a few servers on a deal website. I think it would be a good idea to get 2 small servers and then make a cluster for fault tolerance.

Kyle

 

[JohnnyPC]

If you're a student building this for your school then I would imagine that it should ultimately have some higher educational purpose while the function and performance would come as a bonus or perk. What makes a server a server anyway? It the configuration of the software to perform the serving you want it to do in the first place. Considering this, then practically any hardware would do. NT/2000 obviously have more HW requirement than Linux and maybe you can use this as a bottom line on that sort of actual pieces you should be looking for. Once you have the purpose and role the server identified then you can also make a decision on what sort of redundancy you'll need. Now it this is indeed a mission critical server then I would look at a big three mfg for the HW and some sort of official support plan...