I've been using AMD processors exclusively since 2000 starting with the K6-2 up through the Athlon XP (1800, 2000, 2600 and 3000 that I'm using currently). Out of all of them, I've only had the K6-2 fail after a year or so which I blame on sub-par cooling on my part. I've always ran my boxes 24/7.
I think your choice of AMD vs Intel is less relevant to reliability than your choice of motherboard and memory as flakey motherboards and ram along with insufficient cooling seem to be the biggest causes of instability in my limited experience. I had excellent reliability/stability running a combination of an AMD Athlon 2600+, a Tyan Trinity KT-400 and a pair of matched Corsair Extreme XMS DDR modules. This was the case not only with Linux but with OpenBSD as well. Since the death of K6-2 I've gone overboard with the cooling on my systems and haven't lost a processor yet. I still have all of them and they are all still functional. A cool case seems to lead to long life. Regardless of whether you go Intel or AMD, do your research on not only the motherboards themselves but the associated chipsets and don't be cheap with the quality of RAM or with the case fans. For RAM, Corsair has made a loyal customer out of me. To answer your question directly, a pair of opterons on a Tyan board with Corsair RAM and a well-reviewed PSU would be my choice. -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
