I have a budget of $3,400 for my next system, yet I'm having a devil of a time finding product to match my money. =( My savings accounts will be full by mid June. It should be pointed out that this large figure covers only the motherboard, CPUs, and RAM. All other components are either already purchased or will be purchased separately.

Let me prefix this by stating that my current and previous main computers are AMD systems. My 2000 vintage Athlon 800 still functions as my server and my main dual 1.2 ghz AthlonMP (built in 2003) is straining under the loads of awful linux software. =(

I am an "AMD fanboi" and proud of it. For the sake of competitive markets, I am biased towards AMD in inverse proportion to their market share. I've been dreaming of my next AMD system for years.

I've wanted an Opteron since it came out, I couldn't afford it at the time so I bought the previous generation at a discount. OK. Now it's time for an Opteron. Unfortunately, I haven't found any workstation boards (no on-board video, plenty of IO) for the G34 platform. Okay, so I decided to consider actually putting a desktop chip on my desktop. (perish the thought!). So I went to the usual vendors and found a bewildering variety of seemingly identical parts.

So I went to amd.com to see what the deal was. There was a bunch of blather but no information about any of the chipsets. =((( In short, there was nothing there that I'd be willing to spend money on. I want nothing but bandwidth. Literally. I don't want audio, I want bandwidth, I don't want graphics, I want bandwidth. I don't want overclocking, I want ECC codes and RF-tuned PCB construction.

ARGH!!!!

As a system builder i can tell you the best way to go about it is to match the budget as per your needs not how much cash u willing to blow

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My El Cheapo move to better PC Audio!
http://forums.amd.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=13&threadid=153336&enterthread=y

Nice problem to have..

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MSI K7N2 Delta2 LSR|35w XP-M2400 11x214 1.62V|2x512MB OCZ EL 2 2 2 11 2.9V|9600XT|Seasonic 350w
Abit AN7|XP-M2800 10.5x227 1.62V|2x512MB Mushkin XP4000 2 3 2 11 3.2V|9600XT|Seasonic 550w
Asus A7V600|XP-M2600 6-11x202 1.6V|2x512 Crucial PC3200 2.5 3 3 9 2.7V|PCI 32MB gfx|Corsair 450w

One thing I did was to buy a dual, quad core Opteron server. Then used a smaller and
cheaper workstation for the video via remote X-Windows.

My server is very fast;

My new dual socket server / workstation, Sun X2200 M2

Memory bandwidth is quite high, even though it's only DDR2 667Mhz.

A bit noisy, but it's remote to my home office desk.

If I were to repeat it today, I might buy fast Flash SATA drives instead of 15K RPM
SAS drives.

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Arwen Evenstar
Rivendale, ME