[WinMac] Re: cheap and fast NT server

Daniel L. Schwartz(expresso[at]snip.net)
Tue, 05 Oct 1999 11:27:45 -0400

        Mike,

        There are a few landmines here, not the least is the disk access and
reliability.

        Having two UDMA (IDE) drives on the same channel is NFG, because only one
drive can be accessed at a time. Use two independent SCSI drives and use
NT's software RAID 0 for striping instead: Put the pagefile and the spool
folders on this partition, and sit back & allow NT to do the dirty work for
you. There's all sorts of motherboards out there with built-in adapcrap
7880 UW chips on them, so you don't even lose a PCI option slot.

        I'm not a big fan of overclocking, since it can bring up all kinds of
mysterious, non-reproducible crashes. Overclocking is OK for gamers, but
not for enterprise use. Instead, take a look at the Athlon (K7) CPU
architecture: The floating point performance is outstanding.

        Also, pay close attention to the PCI bus: I/O throughput is your most
important parameter. With good I/O you don't need a ton of RAM; and since
RAM has about tripled in price in the last few months, RAM cost is (once
again) something to pay attention to.

        Lastly, along these same lines, avoid anything ISA like the plague - With
the exception of modems (because PCI modems "husband" the host CPU for
signal processing). Unfortunately, every ISA interrupt generates 4 PCI
interrupts as it crosses the PCI-ISA bridge - Yuck! Where the trouble
arises is in the i8042 ISA controller for keyboard, mouse, floppy, serial,
and parallel ports: Instead, since this will be driving one (or more)
printers(s) plus the dongle, move the parallel port(s) onto a PCI option
card - Preferably one that supports DMA (Direct Memory Access). With a DMA
parallel port card, the CPU doesn't need to manage it nearly as much. [If
you use Win2k you can move the dongle to the USB port, as Birmy is doing.
In addition, all versions of Win2k - Including Professional (workstation)
support AFP/IP natively.]

        Hope this helps!
        Dan

At 08:19 PM 10/4/99 -0400, Mike K. wrote:
>Here's one for y'all....
>
>We have a sfw RIP for color proofers that runs under NT.
>
>To make our product more cost-friendly (cheaper) we have been
>experimenting with dual-Celeron machines.
>
>The results so far....
>Using an ASUS dual CPU PSB-D m/b and 2 x 500 MHz Celeron, we have been
>able to over-clock the CPU's to 562 MHz with stability. 256 MB RAM,
>dual hard drives (one to read the PS file, one to raster it) and we're
>using BusMaster drivers for the HD's to allow synchronous i/o to the
>drives.
>
>We are trying to market this solution to our clients as "buy our RIP and
>get an NT server for free!" Kinda'' catchy, eh? (Canadian accent here)
>
>Does anyone have any experiences in creating fast and cheap (I hope they
>are not mutually exclusive) NT servers using dual Celeron's and then
>over-clocking them?
>
>Our RIP sfw. is very RAM and CPU intensive. Does anyone have
>suggestions to make the server faster? Any replies would be
>appreciated.
>
>Thanx,
>
>--
>Michael Kulyk
>MACSPECTRUM
>416-236-5585
>416-236-5586 (fax)

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