Best Chip Set(s) for AMD Phenom?

[Yu Meng Chong]

Hi all, 

>I have a gigibyte GA-MA78GM-S2H running a dual core which is fine, and

I have a Gigabyte GA-MA69VM-S2 and the built-in Gigabit Ethernet chip gives me problems on Fedora/CentOS, though it seems to work on SuSE/OpenSuse. 

Personally, I recommend AMD Opteron-based systems to my customers because the processors seem to run cooler than Intel processors. Heat can be a real problem in my corner of the world -- local companies that don't have a server room with 24-hour air-conditioning soon find that their servers have very short lifespans (about 1 year, tops). A lot of small businesses in Singapore don't have 24-hour air conditioning and the server sits in the same office area as the people, so noise can be a problem too. This rules out most rackmount servers. So, tower servers with cooler chips are the way to go. 

Performance isn't really an issue here, unlike in the US where your typical SMB has between 40 and 200 employees (this would be a mid-to-large-sized company here). Typical CPU load for a small business (20 users average) is less than 5%, and this is on a server that functions as an email + file + print server. 

I'd like to try out the Phenom, but besides games, I can't really see any use for all that computing power. 

Regards,
pascal chong