Recomendations for a dual Xeon board

I'm looking for recomendations on which motherboard I should get. I'm
planning on running dual 2.4 or 2.6Ghz 553fsb Xeons with Windows XP Pro.
I'm a developer and want the dual processors for testing threaded code. I
also run VMWare a lot and the dual processors takes a lot of the noticable
impact of running virtual machines away from the system.

I'm not much of a gamer. I do own a couple of games, but I haven't actually
played them in months.

Here's what I'm basically looking to do:
dual xeon processors
1 Gig of RAM minimum
SATA RAID 0 drives
I have a g-force video card for running dual monitors (Asus Ti-4200) and
plan to reuse that.
I don't need a high end sound system, I just use it for listening to music
while I work (winamp, windows media player...)
single NIC

My current setup: (which I am happy with but it's time to upgrade)
WIN XP Pro (just recently upgraded from W2k Pro after memory and hdd
failure)
dual P3 700
Asus P2B-D
1 Gig mem (max for this board)
4 IDE hard drives (a little over 200Gig)
IDE CDBurner
Asus Ti4200 video card running 2 monitors.
10/100 NIC (100 Base-T network)
Adaptec 2940 SCSI (DVD reader, CDROM, JAZ)
ISA Sound Blaster sound card
Maxtor Ultra ATA/133 PCI running hard drives
mother board IDE running CDBurner

Stability is key for me. I never turn my machines off and I am on a
network. I run SQL Server developers edition locally for software
develpoment (lots of database stuff). I rarely reboot, unless a patch
requires me to or it's been a while (a month or so).

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Jim

Supermicro make a range of dual CPU motherboards and always seem to come out
well in magazine reviews etc. I've never used them myself, though I did
have a dual Pentium CPU Intergraph workstation a long time ago.

www.supermicro.com is where to find them.

Jonathan

"Jim H" wrote in message
s.com...
I'm looking for recomendations on which motherboard I should get. I'm
planning on running dual 2.4 or 2.6Ghz 553fsb Xeons with Windows XP Pro.
I'm a developer and want the dual processors for testing threaded code. I
also run VMWare a lot and the dual processors takes a lot of the noticable
impact of running virtual machines away from the system.

I'm not much of a gamer. I do own a couple of games, but I haven't
actually
played them in months.

Here's what I'm basically looking to do:
dual xeon processors
1 Gig of RAM minimum
SATA RAID 0 drives
I have a g-force video card for running dual monitors (Asus Ti-4200) and
plan to reuse that.
I don't need a high end sound system, I just use it for listening to music
while I work (winamp, windows media player...)
single NIC

My current setup: (which I am happy with but it's time to upgrade)
WIN XP Pro (just recently upgraded from W2k Pro after memory and hdd
failure)
dual P3 700
Asus P2B-D
1 Gig mem (max for this board)
4 IDE hard drives (a little over 200Gig)
IDE CDBurner
Asus Ti4200 video card running 2 monitors.
10/100 NIC (100 Base-T network)
Adaptec 2940 SCSI (DVD reader, CDROM, JAZ)
ISA Sound Blaster sound card
Maxtor Ultra ATA/133 PCI running hard drives
mother board IDE running CDBurner

Stability is key for me. I never turn my machines off and I am on a
network. I run SQL Server developers edition locally for software
develpoment (lots of database stuff). I rarely reboot, unless a patch
requires me to or it's been a while (a month or so).

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Jim

Redundancy is not really a concern. The data is all source code which gets
backed up by another machine and compresses very well so it doesn't take up
a lot of space.

The Space on my workstation is an issue because the software I use takes up
a lot of space and I have some very large files. I run a few VMWare
machines during my testing and they can take up some significant disk space.

I was considering the RAID 0 solutions just to speed up disk reads and
writes. The compilers are fairly disk intensive. They're a lot of small
fles constantly beling loaded and/or changed durig the compiles. Will RAID
not really help that much. I thought with the faster processors and faster
memory that the disk was going to be the biggest bottleneck. What do you
think? I'm not expecting huge gains but I thought it would be noticable.

Questions:
Why does a hardware raid put a higher CPU load on the system than software?
I thought that was the idea behind the hardware solutions. Is there no
benifit to a hardware RAID card than striping the volumes in windows?

Thanks again,
jim

"dorothy.bradbury" wrote in message
...
Also check on Tyan re price, since the Xeon is somewhat pricey
now in relation to Opteron solutions. Tyan Dual Xeon motherboards
are generally a cheaper solution, Supermicro the best but expensive.

Remember RAID-0 is really AID-0 - you gain nothing in reliability,
so don't forget a backup device matched to the data's importance.

Personally if hard drive capacity isn't critical I would pick up:
o Quality 9GB SCSI drives re 3-5yr warranty
---- also gives you access to 10,000rpm drives economically
o RAID card like a Mylex 170
---- offers RAID 5, LVD U/160 SCSI support
---- U/160 is fine for 2-3 drives re capacity
---- more importantly a more reliable solution for RAID

Be aware that the RAID h/w solutions often gain little:
o Obviously no redundancy for RAID-0
o Higher CPU load & no better transfer rate than s/w solution

The benefit of the h/w SCSI RAID solution above is in the actual
recovery of the system in terms of time/effort needed. Operating
system or low-end IDE have poor recovery, the proper SCSI h/w
solutions are often seamless in the background.

Remember for RAM & PSU to check what the motherboard
recommends because there are often specific requirements.
--
Dorothy Bradbury

Questions:
Why does a hardware raid put a higher CPU load on the system than
software?
I thought that was the idea behind the hardware solutions. Is there no
benifit to a hardware RAID card than striping the volumes in windows?

Sorry for the delay in replying, been busy.

Yes it is contrarian:
o H/W Raid *should* be quicker than s/w Raid
o However, most low-end IDE Raid h/w cards are in fact same/slower

Thus you are paying for a h/w solution which gains little:
o No easy rebuild if array damaged
---- ie, auto-rebuild or auto-reboot-&-recovery
o No performance benefit (at cheap IDE) over software
---- probably because of coding & local CPU v P3/P4 CPU

The former of those is the real problem.
Do not underestimate how hard it can be to recover a system,
at least if you have anything time critical re duration to fully-up.

Personally I prefer to not RAID-0 the system disk, but have 3 disks
with 2 for data which are RAID-0 and one for system which is plain.

Mixing system & data disks on RAID-0 either s/w or h/w complicates
the recovery procedure - it's not seamless outside of high-end solutions.

Just something to consider.
Investigate "recovering RAID-0 system disk" for your O/S, and then
decide whether you want a 2-disk RAID-0 or 3-disk System & RAID-0.

Thanks.
--
Dorothy Bradbury
www.stores.ebay.co.uk/panaflofan (Ebay)
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/dorothy...ry/panaflo.htm (Direct Prices)