Pickin' a processor

[David Kramer]

I'm gearing up to build a new server to replace my existing one.  My 
Athlon XP 2400+ was plenty good til I got MythTV.  My PVR-350 is doing 
the encoding for me, but since my server's doing so many other 
things[0], I'm getting dropped frames, and if I try to burn a DVD while 
MythTV is recording, I occasionally have system lockups.

At the very least I need to go dual core, so I can really do real 
multiprocessing, and MythTV won't starve the rest of the system, and 
vice verse.  While I'm at it, I want to up the speed at least a little, 
but I think my real gain will be from going dual core.

The Intel website is very good at giving you the specs of their 
processors, letting you compare them, and even select by feature.  The 
AMD website, on the other hand, doesn't even have a page describing the 
difference between Athlon and Opteron, let alone individual chips.  I 
now understand that AMD uses a direct connection to memory instead of 
classic FSB, which also makes comparisons hard, but their pages don't 
talk about L2 cache, which also confuses me.  Is that also not needed 
with the way they access memory?

So what advice can you give me?  It looks like the chips I'm interested 
in are around $200, and I'm OK with that, as long as it performs.

Oh, and are there any particular montherboards I should run to or from 
these days?  I know there have always been boards with funky chipsets or 
other hardware that have thrown Linux for a loop.

Thanks in advance.



[0] This box is also my firewall, postfix, dovecot, Apache, subversion, 
mailman, and home automation server.  Running multiple computers is not 
an option for me, as I've said in the past.


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