[Discuss] best dual core Linux box

[Robert Krawitz]

On Sun, 18 Sep 2011 11:29:27 -0400 (EDT), Daniel Feenberg wrote:
>
> We are in the midst of licensing the SAS software product for a
> server. This is an extremely expensive product, and the charge for a
> quad-core machine is tens of thousands of dollars more than for a
> dual-core machine. If you are unfamiliar with SAS, it does lots of
> sequential I/O and is rarely CPU bound. So we are looking to put
> together a high performance machine that uses only a dual-core
> processor. I know that dual-core is now usually very low-end (or
> laptop) but creative suggestions are welcome. Ideally we would like
> PCI-e slots for SAS or SATA controllers so that we can have a lot of
> fast local storage.

You might look at something like an older Core 2 Duo E8600, possibly
overclocked.  I have an E8400 (actually the Xeon equivalent, due to
availability at the moment I bought it) that's rated for 3.00 GHz but
I've OC'ed it to 3.60 with no difficulty (the limit was probably how
fast I could clock the memory, plus I didn't try for anything more).
Those processors have always overclocked very well.

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

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