Just threw together a cheap fileserver. Consists of an AM2 4600+ Windsor F3, Asus M2A-VM, 1gb Corsair PC5400, OCZ StealthXstream 500w, and a 500gb seagate 32mb cache drive, wrapped up in a huge ass intel server case with a 6 bay hotswap sata/sas enclsure. All running Windows Server 2008 enterprise. I'd just like to say, without a doubt, that: 1. AMD cpu's are very well priced. Very, very well priced. 2. The Asus M2A-VM seems to be a good board, short the fact that it has problems booting to IDE DVD drives. Worked fine booting to vista though. 3. 1gb of ram IS enough for a file server even with x64 server 2008. 4. The OCZ StealthXstream seems to be fine at such a low load. I kill-a-watt'd it and it was drawing less than 100w. 5. The intel server case is very well made. 6. Sockets > LGA's. 7. Server 2008 is quite good. Normally I'd use freebsd for my stuff, but since I didn't want to bother with it, I just used server08. And, I'm never, ever going to use linux for any computers. All in all, I'm very impressed by amd's windsor F3 processors. Great price, great performance, and if you don't need to overclock, it's an amazing deal. I'm so impressed, I might even buy a phenom now.
What do you mean by "good performance"? Surely unless you had several more disks, a server of that spec is complete overkill?
Why do you say socket is better then LGA? Any specific reasons or do you just prefer the AMD cooling system or something?
I still think AM2-cooler mounting is way better than the pins of S775... I'm somewhat surprised it draws less than 100 W from the grid. Is that load or idle? Maybe the Windsor F3 is the magic word because at AMD as my old X2 4600+ setup with 8600GTS took 240 W from the grid and new C2D E6750 @ 3,2 GHz and 8800GTS (G92) takes 230 Watts (these are load wattages, measured using the same kill-a-watt and same PSU) And on the other hand my M2A-VM with 3500+ took around 80 W... Though I think that was due to poor PSU that didn't really please the kill-a-watt. (I just woke up and damn is it painful to try to write english)
I find it to be more secure, easier, and has absolutely no give. with LGA775, before you have the top plate locked down, you can still move the cpu around quite a bit. That, and the stock cooling system is much, much better. One twist bit instead of 4 push pins. It's load. I have a 90nm windsor f3. No seperate video card, only 1 hdd right now.
Phenoms are good CPUs although perhaps a tad too many problems occur and they still dont stand up quite to the level of the Quad core2s.
Yay for Phenoms. but they stole my nickname. its one i've been using for years now, just letting you know its not the other way round
