On Sunday 17 December 2006 03:51 am, Michael Fothergill wrote: > I thought to buy myself an AMD 64 bit machine. > I want to get a box that can have e.g. 10GB of RAM added to it. > I noticed that some opteron machines exist on the internet with 10GB of > RAM on them.
Depending on the motherboard chipset, AMD64-based systems can have up to 64 GB of RAM (that's the highest I've seen so far, in theory it can address a lot more than that). This is highly chipset-dependent, though, and you'll find that only the highest-end server boards can do this. Low-end server and workstation boards tend to handle up to 16 GB of RAM, and desktop boards tend to only support 8 GB. The type of RAM varies as well (unbuffered ECC RAM, buffered ECC RAM, non-ECC RAM, etc), and depends on the socket (939, 940, AM2). > Someone said that you need the 940 pin motherboard to be able to add a > lot of RAM. The Opteron Socket 940 was needed to address more than 8 GB. The new Socket AM2 can handle oodles of RAM, and is used for both server and desktop boards. > How hard is it to install Etch AMD64 on a box relative to an i386 box? The installer is the same for both. 90% of the software available for i386 is also available in a native amd64 format. The software repos for /etc/apt/sources.list are the same for both, if using etch. The software repos for the amd64 version of sarge use a different format, but who'd want to use sarge when etch has official amd64 support and will become stable in the next month or so? > I want to buy myself a box that will last a long time. So if in 5 > years time you need 5GB of RAM to run gnome and OO properly with the > latest release of Debian I can take what would be an older box but make > use of the 64 bit architecture to let me add more RAM than the 32 bit > would ever allow you to do because of its physical limitations. Get a Socket AM2 motherboard that can handle up to 16 GB of RAM. Preferably a dual-socket board if you can afford it. That way, you can start with a single-core Athlon64, move to dual-Athlon64s, to dual-core Athlon64 X2s, without changing motherboards. Go from 1 to 4 to possibly 8 cores all with the same mobo. :) We did this with our servers, although on Socket 940 boards as AM2 wasn't out yet. We have dual-Opteron systems with 8 GB RAM running Debian etch amd64. Upgrade plans for next year are dual-core CPUs and another 8 GB RAM. These systems also have 5 TB of disk space hanging off a 3Ware Escalade 9550SX-12, with another 12 empty drive bays (we're waiting for the price of the 750 GB drives to drop before putting them in the box). :) These are storage and Xen boxes. -- Freddie Cash, LPIC-2 CCNT CCLP Network Support Technician School District 73 (250) 377-HELP [377-4357] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
