[NOS2Go4Me]

I have a 3-drive U160 RAID-5 for our Exchange databases here at the office, and it's quite fast on the ServeRAID 5i cable-less adapter it's on.

I've benched the U320 RAID-1s we're running, and they're STUPID fast. No other word for it.

If I have the extra cheddar come rebuild time... my 2 x 80GB Maxtor SATA RAID-0 will be replaced by a 2x74GB U320 RAID-0 on an Adaptec card, for sure. Something PCI-Express at that to ensure there's enough damn system bandwidth, none of this 133MB/sec PCI crap either :P

The AMD X2 3800+ is out in August. The one thing everyone keeps forgetting is that you're getting 2 cores (but only one stack of memory). You're essentially building a duallie box on the cheap, like an older Tyan or maybe MSI's dual-processor offerings (with one memory bus). You're spending an extra processor's worth compared to single-core retail prices (with a premium of 50-150 bucks, depending on the retailer), but you don't need to buy the rest of your PC's hardware to support another physical core. I don't need to tell you how much that isn't. :)

I have no problem spending 500-700 bucks, because I'll double my distributed computing throughput. I'll lower my video encode times by almost half (with the right programs, and especially with X86-64 programs in XP Pro-64), and I can encode on one core and easily game on the other. Or, I can run one DC job on one core and game on the other.

It's limitless, really. Once enough enthusiasts make peace with the fact that they're spending another 400 bucks for an entire PC, it becomes easier to swallow.

And, I hate to say it too, but the Intel boxes don't appear to scale anywhere near as nicely because of the Northbridge-based memory controller and the fact that the memory requests share the same FSB. Because most of the DC offerings from Intel (save the XEs) are on the dated 800FSB, you're facing quite the contention issue when two memory-intensive programs are running at the same time.

EDIT - I have it on good authority that AMD and 3rd-party vendors are trying something that blows my mind - dual-core chips on a NUMA-aware and configured board. One set of DDR channels per core. It's a modification of what we currently have (where the two cores are connected via a common crossbar and a common HTT point, one memory bus shared), and most likely a new socket will be created.

Still... NUMA-aware dual-processor boxes bench in the 10GB/sec range with DDR400 channels and ECC/registered RAM... imagine an overclocked dual-channel, DDR400 system with NUMA memory allocation. HOLY... FREAKING... CRAP.

Intel really needs to ditch the Northbridge-based memory access configuration. It's slaughtering their servers, and it's not helping their desktops / workstations, either.