Upgrade Help, Please Check My Setup

My son runs a P4 2.8 oced to 3.2 on a 350W PSU.

I wasn't leaning towards the Xeon anyways since they get beatin most benches and are more expensive than the Opterons.

Are there any PCIe boards for the Opteron?

In terms of performance, an Opteron 144 is equal to what Xeon?

What can I improve other than the psu?

All 350W supplies are not created equal and it's not a place to scrimp. If you won't take my advice to boost this, then any other advice will fall flat as well. Your list included more than a CPU with many drives and more.

It's much like driving your car at 100 MPH. It just doesn't last very long. If your car was built to run at say 150MHP, then it would do fine.

With the list you supplied, the big power supply and a DUAL CPU could be king.

Bob

I'll up the PSU to 450W. I don't know if I need DUAL CPU. Problem is that if I go with a processor that needs registered memory, then I won't have to buy the memory. I pulled out 1 GB of DDR266 ECC Reg. and 2 GB of DDR333 ECC Reg. out of machines at work that were being trashed.

What else can I change? I don't really know about the dual CPU setup, any advantages to it?

With the recycling going on, the goal of this project is unknown to me.

At first I thought you were trying to be an entry level database server, but then you reveal you don't know why a dual CPU would give you an edge.

Let's start over and tell what the goal is.

Let me be blunt and write that a single Xeon of the speed you noted could easily benchmark slower than a new 3+GHz P4 HT and the RAM tends to not pay off past 512M. Even on databases I've seen.

Been there, done that.

Bob

I work as an SQL and Oracle DBA. I have to work at home too. This is to be used for a server on a home network. The other machines on the network will be on Pentium III and Celeron (don't comment on the Celeron). I have a limited budget. I will not go over $700 and that is an if. I'm going with the Opteron because a Xeon is simply a Pentium 4 with 64-Bit extensions. Where as the Opteron actually is something different. What can I do? Any suggestions?

After chasing such setups for years, a portable MySQL server we use to demonstrate realtime data collection from dataloggers runs on some 733 MHz VIA all in one board with 512M and a single 40G IDE 7200 generic drive. So no ground pounder is needed if one just wants to do realtime SQL.

You may want to look at what I would do...

NEVER SKIMP on the power and look at the Opteron since you get the next generation without the price. Or get the Athlon 64 since I believe Oracle has a version ready for the Suse 9.1/9.2 64-bit Linux. You'd step ahead with ease.

The goal is a little less fuzzy, but the one lesson I've learned is that if you skimp on the power supply you will learn why I noted it.

Then you can work up a spreadsheet to see what costs less.

You don't want to know I picked a HP desktop with the Athlon 64, 512M and other things and it just works. I wouldn't have saved that much, but did save time and the system (Suse, MySQL) was running that same day. You may have more time that I had.

Bob

Getting the Athlon 64 is the more expensive option since I will have to buy memory for it. I've decided to go for the Opteron 144 since I have more than enough memory for it. I've changed my case to a better one that has a better PSU (450W, I believe).

Are there any PCIe 16x Socket 940/Opteron boards? (Please just answer the question, I know the technology behind it and the reasons not to go PCIe as of right now, but still please answer my question.)

Actually, I don't know if I should actually trust AMD this time around. I have had a bad experience with AMD. An Athlon XP 3000+ that I did not like in terms of performance, curse that thing (sorry). I think I will go for the Xeon. Shed some light on the subject of AMD and Intel (no Flaming)?