At 13:15 12/21/2005 -0800, Michael J McCafferty wrote: >All, > For as much hardware I buy, one would think me more of a hardware nut. My >excuse is that I decide what I am going to buy, then buy tons of the same >thing, so I don't need to make HW decisions very often. That being the case, I >would like to ask your opinions of the following hardware brands. The question >is intentionally vague. I wan't the reputation, the beat on the street, the >impression, etc. The ultiamte use will be for small, entry-level, commodity >servers for light jobs etc. So, any of the below will do the job, but in this >case it matters what the average geek's impression of the below is. > >Motherboards: > >ASUS
I have had good luck with these, both in servers and workstations. The servers had P2B-D dual processor Pentium III slot processors and ran contiuously for over 7 years without problems until being retired. The workstations had the P5A-B boards with K6-2/400 processors and worked great. ASUS has also extended their warranty out to 3 years as compared to one year for most other brands. >MSI Don't know personally. They don't seem to have a very good reputation by various reports. >Intel These seem to be fairly decent boards but I don't have enough history on them to say for certain. >Gigabyte >Supermicro Don't know about these. ><your favorite here> I would add Tyan here. I have my old Trinity board which has been running my desktop for about 6 years. It has survived two power supply failures and innumerable power cycling (I turn my PC off when I'm not using it) without a hitch. They also have a three year warranty. >CPU's (Do NOT compare P4 to Celeron, or Athlon to Sempron) I've never seen a CPU failure so I can't really comment here. All this concentration on boards and CPUs ignores the real troublemakers which are cooling fans, power supplies and hard drives. I usually have to replace fans within a year, power supplies after about 2-3 years and hard drives about 3 years. Some parts seem to last forever, but others even from the same lot will fail within months. One of the things to remember in all this is that past performance is no guarantee of future suitablity. Product lifecycle is typically around 9 months to a year, and even within a single model there are various versions that change even more frequently. Thus it is very difficult to judge a current product. Even reputable manufacturers can fall prey to bad components. Witness the motherboard capacitor problem from a while back <http://www.badcaps.com> Gus -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
