Pickin' a processor

[Matthew Gillen]

David Kramer wrote:
> 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?

Wikipedia is your friend.  The amount of detailed info they have on CPUs is
astounding.   For instance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Athlon_64_microprocessors
tells you that you need at least a "Windsor" stepping to get the hardware
virtualization feature.

> 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.

I still think AMD gives more bang for the buck.  I recently got an Athlon 64
X2 4000+ (dual-core with hw virtualization) for $80.

> 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.

FWIW, maybe I just buy slightly older hardware all the time now (to stay in
the nice part of the price curve), but I haven't had issues like I used to
with that.  My last couple of purchases have been small-form-factor (and
/quiet/) boxes, like the T3 model here:
http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=1&l2=2

I would have thought that the odd ball form factor would have put it more in
the exotic hardware category, but I haven't had any problems.

I can give more details if you're interested.
Good luck,
Matt

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