Best Chip Set(s) for AMD Phenom?

[Leon Goldstein]

Yu Meng Chong wrote:

>Hi all, 
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>>I have a gigibyte GA-MA78GM-S2H running a dual core which is fine, and
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>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. 
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Is this just an ethernet chip issue, or are there other issues related
to the chip set?

>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. 
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The Intel Core 2 Duo CPU's, at least the 1.8 gHz and 2.2 gHz I have
experience with, are "cool" in all regards.  Intel got these right.

<snip>

>I'd like to try out the Phenom, but besides games, I can't really see any use for all that computing power. 
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When I fired up my 1.8 gHz Core 2 Duo box, I was stunned by the very
conspicuous snappiness of Linux with a SMP kernel.  I mentioned before
that a kernel recompile (Libranet 3.0) took a little over 20 minutes on
1.8 gHz Core 2 duo box compared to over 40 minutes on a P4 2.2 gHz
system.  Solaris 10 x86 really flies with a multi-core CPU.  By the same
token, I saw absolutely no noticeable speed up with Win XP.

I just like not seeing the Linux hour glass as much as before.

-- 
Leon A. Goldstein

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