[geeks] value of PIII PC servers

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: "Jonathan C. Patschke" <jp at celestrion.net>
>Date: Thu Jun 22 19:45:39 CDT 2006
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] value of PIII PC servers

<snip>

>It's pretty sad that you can spend $16k on a beefy PC (4 Opterons, 64GB
>memory, decent motherboard, and a reasonable amount of disk), and it
>still sucks just like any other PC with its "BIOS", crap diagnostics,
>and legacy idiocy.

I built up a few machines for home, all based on the Intel D101GGC motherboard, dualcore Intel 805 CPU (2x 2.66 GHz CPU, each with 1 Meg cache), and 1 Gig RAM (desktops to run WinXP, Vista Beta, and UBUNTU desktop), and ontly the one machine with SATA drives has decent performance - the two with IDE drives inhale *deeply*. To prove my theory, I swaped out the PATA drives in one machine for a SATA drive, and it ran as expected.

With the IDE drives, it took MINUTES to boot WinXP. Minutes. Changing widows was really painful - it reminded me of the 80486 machine I bought years ago that had the clock set at 4.77 MHz, not 33 MHz... Wow, that was slow...

x86 hardware IS fun!

Lionel