Zacate - Did I just not do my homework?

[Spikesoldier]

Honestly, after reading what people wrote, I did set my expectations a little too high. I bought into the hype... I was expecting that Zacate was K10 performance in an Atom power envelope. At least that's what I inferred from the fervor pitch from a few months ago and then tuned it out.

Thankfully, I know enough about the system setup and how the OS works, so once I had the little nuances under control, I realized the server itself - as a whole - is working exactly as it should. It's not like I'm going to be running heavy database apps or whatnot on it. I'm not entirely sure if I'll even be doing much video streaming off it (one of the things WHS is intended for) - which is what the CPU power is needed for. With all that out of the way, as I said, there still seems to be some overall bottleneck in the storage subsystem, but it's manageable at this point. I haven't migrated over to a faster boot drive, because frankly there's no real need.

I was a bit disappointed, yet again because I didn't do my homework, that the E350M1 (and most Zacate boards in general) don't support RAID even though the chipset itself is capable. I will be getting a hardware RAID card and throwing in several 1TB drives for the actually "storage" part of the system in the near future. So as I said, the WD being the boot drive is really a non-issue for me at this point. It won't be part of the storage pool in the long term.

Other than that, I still do have some concerns about the AHCI driver not being nearly as capable as Intel's solutions. AMD has always had week storage drivers, and I think Zacate exacerbates that somewhat being a slower setup in general. But it gets the job done regardless. The system is up and running, and most importantly STABLE for the time being. I'm satisfied.

what raid are you planning on running? have you considered softraid?

 

[mrSHEiK124]

Zacate vs K8:

My dad was using an older Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (Socket 939,

) and I just built him an E-350 machine in an Antec ISK300. He is a lot happier with the Zacate build, although size, noise, and boot time [SSD] might have something to do with it.

 

[toyota]

4 1/2 years later and you still find a way to get him an even slower cpu...

 

[VirtualLarry]

TBH, I see little difference in terms of web-browsing capability between my Q9300 and my Zacate rig.

Both rigs have 7200RPM HDs, neither one has an SSD. (Zacate rig has Seagate 7200.12 1TB, Q9300 has WD 6400AAKS.)

 

[toyota]

TBH, I see little difference in terms of web-browsing capability between my Q9300 and my Zacate rig.

Both rigs have 7200RPM HDs, neither one has an SSD. (Zacate rig has Seagate 7200.12 1TB, Q9300 has WD 6400AAKS.)

well then it sounds like something is wrong with your Q9300 rig.

I used the Atom , E-350 and then an Athlon 2 X2 all back to back and the differences were obvious as could be. the Atom was just painfully slow so that made the E-350 feel much better. and it was completely clear that the E-350 was much much slower than the Athlon 2 X2 just for basic usage. and the E-350 was laughably slow at loading games/apps or opening a zip file.

 

[86waterpumper]

If I was building a htpc or fileserver either one right now I would go for a cheap h61 board, and a G620/t. Heck the pentium 620 is a 60 dollar cpu, and h61 boards can be had for around 50 something bucks. If you wanted to spend 30 more dollars you could have the 620t which has a 35watt tdp. For basically the same or a bit more money you would have more processing power as well as TONS better sata drivers. You would need room for a matx board though I guess to get the h61 cheap, so I guess if space is a huge issue the e-350 is the best alternative.

 

[mrSHEiK124]

4 1/2 years later and you still find a way to get him an even slower cpu...

Hey now, it's used for web browsing. I think money spent on the SSD vs. a faster CPU was a good call. It's snappy. I use an older AMD...APU, thing, right before Zacate, as my daily driver, hp dm3 - and with an SSD it feels snappier than $7-800 Core i3 and i5 machines. It definitely loads Windows faster. To each their own.

 

[mrSHEiK124]

If I was building a htpc or fileserver either one right now I would go for a cheap h61 board, and a G620/t. Heck the pentium 620 is a 60 dollar cpu, and h61 boards can be had for around 50 something bucks. If you wanted to spend 30 more dollars you could have the 620t which has a 35watt tdp. For basically the same or a bit more money you would have more processing power as well as TONS better sata drivers. You would need room for a matx board though I guess to get the h61 cheap, so I guess if space is a huge issue the e-350 is the best alternative.

What makes you say that?

ASUS P8H61-I (REV 3.0) LGA 1155 Intel H61 HDMI USB 3.0 Mini ITX Intel Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131727
Not exactly as cheap as an MAXT H61, but not a bad deal by any means. Used one in a build, good stuff.

You can go H67 for not much more
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157238
ASRock H67M-ITX LGA 1155 Intel H67 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Mini ITX Intel Motherboard

Buy the regular G620 / 2100 instead of the T versions. SPCR manually dropped the multipliers and set a TDP limit of 35W, the regular chips actually drew less power in some tests . The ASUS board supports both features.

 

[86waterpumper]

Oh i agree it's not much more...it's the route I'd go for sure, just others in this thread have used the price for a reason to go e-350 since it is around 100 bucks for cpu/mb. With a g620/h61 you can hit really close to that amount for a vast amount more of cpu power. I used a 65watt athlon II for my current htpc that I built a few months back and it was a cheap build cost and does great, I don't leave mine running all the time or really record with it, so I chose cpu power over idle power consumption but it still doesn't do too bad. E-350 and atom dual cores seems to work for some people IF the software configs are right and everything is humming along, but there is for sure is just no extra muscle there to do things without a carefully optimized system. Good info on the G620 thanks!

I do hope amd can get their sata driver situation figured out, or this is going to be a ongoing issue for bd probably. If the sata solution was better I'm sure alot of the fileserver issues would be gone

My parents need a machine very similiar to what MrSHEIK got his dad. They are perfectly happy with their 32 bit athlon xp rig from 2002 or 2003 haha. They are still on dialup...and what they do
amounts to saving a few pictures and email, and word processing tasks. They don't need more processing power, they need space and energy savings. It would be nice to get rid of the huge tower and crt monitor. They would be perfectly happy with a single core atom or e350 or whatever.

 

[SunnyD]

Whoops, sorry, I guess I shouldn't just leave threads hanging.

what raid are you planning on running? have you considered softraid?

RAID5 preferably. Possibly RAID 1E. It all depends on the controller I end up with though.

4 1/2 years later and you still find a way to get him an even slower cpu...

This machine sits in a closet that has little ventilation, and a bunch of other hardware running in it. Low overall TDP was key.