Dual processor server

[Blargh]

Ok now ive been looking into building a dual cpu server to run the network in my house for some time now. Primarily gunna be used as a web server and for file storage and internet acess for the computers on my home network, plan on hooking my 2 cable modems to the server and then out to the network threw a gigabit ethernet adapter ( use both modems as one threw win2k server), so dual integrated10/100 lan and 64 bit pci is a must.

Now my question is ...... which processors to use?
Originally i was looking into running a dual p3 tualatin setup, but upon doing reaserch on the price of the newer server p3s like the 1.4-s ($310) i realised that maybe a dual p4 prestonia xeon (2ghz @ $240) or perhaps a dual athlon MP (athlonMP 2000 @ $215) might be better. And looking around at the cost of the motherboards for these setups i found that their all pretty much around the same price ($500), so its pretty much down to which processor preforms better for the cost in this situation, which has the most stable chipsets availible and which generates less heat. Now the server will most likely be running 24/7 so stability and heat is a big concern, especially considering the room it will be residing in doesnt have a huge amount of ventilation (tho i do have a powerful ac in the room that can be used if necessary) so im a bit concerned about the athlons here with their much higher heat output then their intel based competitors.

So which processors would you reccomend in this situation? And would you guys have any suggestions on a chipset to look for for said processors...... been looking at the serverset 3 HE SL for the p3 tualatin setup sofar... but i dunno really what too look for in the p4 xeon or the athlon mp.

Thanx in advance, any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

[mechBgon]

You might find Anand's articles interesting. He tested some server platforms here and here. The tests seem to hit pretty close to the questions you're asking.

 

[Blargh]

Ok well according to those articles the dual athlon MP 2000 and the dual p4 xeon are fairly close in preformance, with the athlons pulling ahead unless hyper threading was enabled on the p4s.... but what about the p3s? Im assuming they wont be anywhere near as powerful as the p4 or athlon, but it would still be nice to kno for comparision purposes. And the article compared the p4 using the e7500 ddr chipset. Now is this chipset a better choice then say the i860 rdram chipset?

Now also on the heat issue anyone have any idea how hot a dual athlonMP 2000 setup would run?

 

[NanoMem]

I don't know much about anything other than chipsets from Intel as I am aware about a handfull of them such as AMD, ServerWorks (I think they're now owned by Broadcom). You basically have a choice between E7500 (16GB DDR200 / No AGP) or i860 (4GB PC800 RDRAM with AGP). Obviously, the AGP platform is targeted more towards high end stations than servers. If details of your web server apps include terminal services, database, search engines among other intensive web tools then you might consider the 16GB chipset and scale it for growth purposes. Otherwise, if your box is intended for simple html or simple resource access and sharing with little or minimal backend demands from the server hardware than you might be better off with i860 and 4GB of RAM. Obviously, I recommend the Xeon over the Athlon in terms of cpu's.
Peace.

 

[Blargh]

Well i didnt plan on installing a video card in this rig as its gunna be a pure server both for my home lan and as a web server, so integrated video is fine. Ok now both the i860 and the e7500 have the same memory bandwidth right? Just one has more support for memory then the other? If so id prolly go for the E7500 as 2gb of DDR266 ECC ram is considerably cheaper then 2 gb of PC800 ECC rdram ($600 vs $1100). As for the athlon i dunno much about their chipsets or procs either..... always been an intel user. Anyone out there that can enlighten me on anything the athlon does better(significantly) then the Xeon in this case.... somethign that would make me want it over a xeon? And how hot something liek that would run temp wise....

 

[mechBgon]

Both CPUs are capable of generating 60W+ of heat per processor, which I believe qualifies as "hot."

As far as the chipsets go, the articles should give you pretty good insight into e7500 versus 760MPX as platforms in the second article. As for i860, the results for single and dual 1.7GHz Xeons here are results based on i860, which you could scale up to 2.2GHz for a rough comparison to the other platforms. (this graph also shows one area where Athlons work really well, namely data processing).

Trivial note: the Xeon is a Xeon, not a "Pentium4 Xeon."

 

[NanoMem]

Yes the ram bandwidth is the same 3.2GB/s. Note E7500 uses dual channel access in addition to Double Data Rate with DDR200 ECC DIMM's to achieve the same memory bandwidth as RDRAM PC800. Dual channeld DDR is not out for the desktop but is available for E7500. You basically will need to populate your DDR Dimms in pairs.

If you expect to do some heavy I/O (LAN, storage access or both) obviously E7500 is the way to go as the SouthBridge is much more powerful in terms of bandwidth. 16GB RAM might also come in handy if and when your file access growth starts to demand RAM in excess of 4GB instead of having to virtualize it on disk although the E7500 gives you 6 individually separated 64-bit/133MHZ PCI-X buses for a total I/O bandwidth of 3.2GB/s therefore matching both CPU and RAM. With I860 you only get 2 buses with either 2 64-bit/66MHZ or 4 64-bit/33MHZ I/O slots. So E7500 should pan out with your Gigabit ethernet.

Btw, if processing power ever becomes an issue you can always build a scalable front end to your main data server(s) with a farm of servers running some kind of load balancing software such as citrix or ms terminal services. If on the other hand the back end becomes overloaded then internal segmentation through the use of switched 10Gigabit LAN and/or SAN might be considered. This is what I call serious bandwidth allocation although I could still keep drilling down into things such as the implememntation of RAID controllers and 15K RPM hard drives. This is some heavy duty hardware that only major corp's can afford requiring some serious dow.
Peace.

 

[Kell]

Well, if you need more than 4GB of RAM, then you'll obviously have to go with dual Xeons on an E7500. Dual AthlonMP platforms only have 4 DIMM slots at best, allowing only 4GB of total memory. i860 is even worse off, as there just isn't a good supply of high-density (1GB and greater) RIMM modules.

If you don't need 4GB, I'd say the dual Athlon is a better choice--power on par with the Xeons at a much better price.

The next question: do you need all this power? AnandTech forums need all the power because they're hosting a very large user community on a high-bandwidth connection. They need hardware to support heavy-duty database operations most of all, which really pushes memory requirements. If you're just running a home webserver, serving static web pages over a cable connection, a simple PII-300 would probably do just fine. Your upstream bandwidth would probably be sucked dry before the CPU reached its limits.

 

[Blargh]

Thanx for all the info guys, im prolly gunna go with the dual xeon and the E7500.... seems like the best solution.

NanoMem its not going to be quite the corporate type server your talking about there lol , it will be a webserver but not to that heavy an extent. I plan on it hosting (if i can set it up) a reg size static webpage as well as a modest size forum, nothing near the extent of the anandtech forums... at least for now. But i also plan on this machine runing my home network ( at least 6 computers not counting this server), giving those computers acess threw my dual cable modem setup (will be gigabit ehternet to the switch then 10/100 out to the rest of the computers.... they dont need it, the gigabit ehternet from the server its just impoirtant that all the possible bandwidth gets to said switch to be divided out), for file storage, and to stream both audio and video files to the computers on the network. Also if necessary in some games that require it i was going to use this machine to host mp games over the internet (like C&C Renegade, the mechwarrior games... whatnot) tho this is a bit of an after thought.

So Kell i can safely say i need/want this kind of power, i may not need it all right now..... but id rather have it now and not need it all then need it later and not have it. In other words id rather not have to upgrade this anytime soon ... other then maybe adding more memory or adding larger hds.

 

[Blargh]

Ok now that i decided on processor and chipset, i gotta decide on mobo. Now i kno this should prolly go in the motherboard forum, but seeing how this pertains to this tread ill put it here. Sofar pretty much all the boards ive seen that have what i want have been from either Tyan or Supermicro. Now i dont have any experiance with either of these manufacturers, so would anyone know which produces better quality boards? I actually have one picked out over at googlegear from SuperMicro and was kinda curious as to the quality of the board, that is if anyone else here has had any experiance with them....

SuperMicro
Supermicro P4DPE

Now i believe this one has everything i wanted.... dual xeon, e7500 chipset, supports up to 16gb DDR200 ECC, dual eide connections capible of ata100, dual onboard NIC, 64bit pci for the gigabit ethernet, decent integrated video (better then the one the tyan at googlgear sports... not that it matters much) etc etc.... Anyone know of anything out there that does this better for around the same price?

*edit and on hindsight...... andyone know of a case that will fit such a large mobo? Says its Extended ATX.... hmmm

 

[MrThompson]

You may want to search the 2CPU forums for "Xeon." 2CPU's Team Xeon has a wealth of information. BTW, you are going to really like Hyper-Threading.

 

[mechBgon]

No SCSI?

As for cases, I believe I read that this is one board which does not fit the popular Antec/clone tower cases such as the SX1000 and SX1200 series. Considering your overall plans for the system, I would look into the LiteOn FS020, the Antec SX1440 server cube, or perhaps an Addtronics 789x. The specs you linked to also suggests some SuperMicro chassis that will work.

Just to throw out another possibility, did you consider building two single-processor servers instead of one whopper dualie?

 

[Blargh]

Thanx for the link MrThompson, ill check there when i have some more free time.

MechBgon theres a few reason i wanted to go a dual system for the server instead of 2 normal comps..... one major reason was space constraints, i dont exactly have room to hae 2 servers setup and running..... lol just barely gonna have room for this single dual system. And second is that theres a few features im looking for that ihave only seen sofar on dual cpu server boards...... like dual onboard lan and 64bit pci for the gigabit ethernet (remember i plan to combine both my cable modems threw this server, and then back out of the server to the network switch) threw the gigabit ethernet conenction, add to that the rather large amount of memory that can be added to a server mobo, and the fact that its ECC (more bandwidth if im not mistaken? correct me if im wrong) is what made my decision here. And right now i dont really need scsi.... as right now im more concerned with total volume of storage space then i am with lightning quick responce times, plus i cant really afford that much space worth of scsi drives , so a few large 7200 rpm eide drives sould do fine.

Ok and back to the cases ..... i was looking around on newegg earlier and found a certain lian li aluminum server case that looks rather promising, so i went to lian lis website and came up with this info link from their online store Lian Li PC-76 *edit gah for some reason i get an error when i try to link directly to the specific case's link...... the one im trying to link to was the PC-76 case near the bottom of the list there.

It claims to have plenty of room to spare with full size atx mobos and dual processor mobos, so that should be plenty big for that SuperMicro mobo i linked to earlier right? And i rather like the rather large amount of cooling this system supplies.... as i said earlier cooling and temperature is a big issue for me hereand the 6! case fans (4 80mm intake and 2 120mm exhaust) should cool things off i think, plus if im not mistaken theres room above the power supply mount for 2 more case fans if necessary. Newegg has some more pics here NewEgg of that case from the inside and all sides. Any comments on the quality of this case? Or if there is something better for maybe a bit cheaper ? as sofar i really like this case... with the exception of its price

 

[MrThompson]

I believe there are a couple of folks on Team Xeon with a PC-76. The Lite-On FS020 mechBgon mentioned is a favorite. My Xeon system is built in Swiftech's watercooled version of the Lite-On. I highly recommend it.

 

[butch84]

uuuuuh, ECC has to do with error checking the memory to increase stability. it has absolutely no performance benefits, and if im not mistaken it can even hurt performance a tiny bit.

Butch

 

[ChrisIsBored]

Second what Buth said, ECC doesn't have anything to do with more bandwidth. It's error correction checking, which is good if you need the safety net for your data, but also a little bit slower.

Just out of curiousity, what exactly is this server for? I've seen lots of people wanting the best server money can buy... when their actual use could be more than easily handled with a cheap 500Mhz system.

 

[mechBgon]

That makes sense about the PCI busses, I forgot about that aspect... doh!

I think the problem with the SuperMicro board is that the CPUs sit at the front end of the board, and the heatsinks interfere with some cases' hard drive cages. The FS020 is sort of wide and might not have that issue as a result, not sure... it does have twin 120mm exhaust and one 120mm intake. Someone said that getting it open is not as easy as it could be, however.

 

[Blargh]

Hmmm would you guys happen to have a link to a store that sells this case? Or perhaps to the manufacturers website? AS i looked before at www.liteon.com and didnt see any pc cases listed anywhere there, and then did a search on pricewatch and only came up with 2 stores that listed the swiftech watercooled version of the case. And personally right now id rather stick with air cooling. I couldnt really see the insides of the water cooled version of the case from those sites , so if ya have a site with pics it would be greatly appreciated.

 

[MrThompson]

Try this. Reviews, dealers and the manufacturer.

 

[MoMeanMugs]

You are wasting your money. For web and file serving, why do you think you need that much power? You don't even need dual processors to do what you need. It's your money, but...

 

[ChrisIsBored]

Originally posted by: Blargh
Ok now ive been looking into building a dual cpu server to run the network in my house for some time now. Primarily gunna be used as a web server and for file storage and internet acess for the computers on my home network, plan on hooking my 2 cable modems to the server and then out to the network threw a gigabit ethernet adapter ( use both modems as one threw win2k server), so dual integrated10/100 lan and 64 bit pci is a must.

Dude you are going WAY WAY overboard for your use. Why do you need dual procs for file storage, web server, and network access? You running an SQL database and planning on 5,000+ hits to your website a day or something?

 

[SSXeon5]

Blargh

Defently agreed on the 2.0a Prestonias and E7500 100%. And you better post pics of it you silly bastard You are doing what I have dreamed to do, build a duel Xeon Rig ... look at my name I love em to death Good luck and defently posts pix

SSXeon

 

[MrThompson]

Blargh - Sorry I must have missed your question about the insides of the watercooled Lite-On. Here is a link to Swiftech. You can read my review of the Quiet Power here.

 

[mechBgon]

If you would like some insight on the actual load demanded by game serving and website-hosting, you should definitely peruse the stats pages for the servers that run Lord Demios's Gamebox.net here: http://www.thegamebox.net/stats/net/ As you can see, LD had over one million hits last year on WWW, and that runs on a dual P3 and doesn't seem to be hurting for CPU usage, judging by the graph. The game servers have an average of 49 players and are dual-P3's as well.

 

[dajeepster]

Go with the watercooling system from Swiftech... definately worth the money... I have 2 of them... now i'm broke and can't get a third