While I wanted the Intel Core 2 Duo confuration, it was too much money. Even when I substituted the processor for a low power wolfdale, the E7200. The Intel option cost $126 more than the AMD/GeForce option. I was up to $457.88 with shipping and tax.
Also, in some power benchmarks, the AMD 4850e did used a lot less power than the most efficient 45nm Intel Core 2 processor, the E7200. Of course, from a performance point of view, the E7200 blows the AMD out of the water, but my needs are for a low-power and 64 bit file server. The AMD 4850e and nForce 750a chipset meets those needs. I'm staying away from any AMD chipsets. There are too many bugs, and I read the brand new AMD 750 chipset has the SAME AHCI issues as the SB600. AMD can't seem to fix it. One other factor that helped in my decision was that Sun sells both X38 and nForce based chipsets in its new workstations. If they work for Sun... I ended up choosing this configuration: > CPU - AMD Athlon X2 4850e 2.5GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 45W > Dual-Core ($77.00) > Motherboard - XFX MDA72P7509 ($134.99) > * nVidia nForce 750a SLI chipset > * 6x SATA, 1x eSATA > * 2x PCIe 2.0 x16 > * nVidia GeForce 8 series integrated video > * 1x Marvell gigabit ethernet At newegg, with tax, shipping, and 4GB of ECC RAM, this cost me $341.71 This solution allows me to add a dual port gigabit ethernet card (PCIe) and the LSI SATA card (PCIe) later on. Thanks for the replies. I will follow up once I get the hardware. _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
