sutton050

As a technologist I've always been interested in the newest kit coming out, and many moons ago this exact demand for kit made me very mad. For you see, the previous year I'd built my first 2 ghz machine, and it was very costly.  Hyper threading was new to the market, at least in the Pentium 4 range.  And as usual I had need for more power from my machines. So I hit the interwebs and found a machine (on ebay I think) which was 2ghz... A nice CPU was mentioned in the specification... But the memory and graphics capability were lacking... I could make the difference up from my spares bin, so I took the dive ordering this machine as a base on which to work. It duely arrived, I plugged it in, and was dismayed to find it clocking only around 1.1 ghz.  Baffled, I check the advert, "Dual core 2 ghz chip" was definiately there, with the sub-note "exact type may vary, select Intel or AMD preference". Back to the machine it is dual core, but it is not 2 ghz, no where n...

You're all aware (I hope) of my stack of servers under the desk, however, the main server I use is actually a re-purposed desktop - it's the G33 chipset Socket 775 to Socket 771 running a Xeon E5420... And I have my plan forming to re-case my main workstation, however, I wondered... As I'm currently very exposed with data not replicated across drives on my little server and the machine being quite high power, whether I might not do better in the short term of recasing both... AND changing the server to an always on box. This way, I could build a machine around a dedicated new board and chip... I started out with the AMD APU's the 2580 and some others, up to a quad core, and as fabulous as they look on cost they didn't float my boat. I don't need a lot of number crunching power on the server, so what was my concern?  Well, I'm an Intel guy... Always have been, and think I always will be.  Obviously I started with MOS processors, then moved into the world of M...