Timothy Murphy wrote:
John Summerfield wrote:
I'm getting memory for a very old (P2B-LS) Asus motherboard,
and I see I can get ECC memory for some 20% more.
Is there any point in getting this?
I see there is quite a lot of work
in getting ECC testing incorporated into the Linux kernel.
But even if it were there, would it be very valuable?
Whether to use ECC ram depends on the mobo; some support it, some don't.
I suspect that mobo supports 384 Mbytes of SDRAM, probably no faster
than PC-100 (but PC-133 works fine); it might not even require it that
fast.
Actually this 450MHz PIII motherboard supports 1GB of ECC PC100 RAM.
I had a p2l (LX chipset) board back when PII was new. Memory is fading
into the mists of tine:-(
I've just been to a computer auction; I suspect that wouldn't even
attract a bid. I'm not sure that there was anything less than a 1.7 Ghz
PIV. <checks>
There were two COMPAQ DESKPRO Pentium IIIs, they went for $AU60+10%
buyers' premium +10% GST.
Well, I'm not planning on selling this machine.
I was targeting its value in terms of replacement cost; a cheapish used
Pentium IV has more life expectancy than an aged Pentium II (or III).
That and whether it's sensible to throw more money at such a dated box;
But your comment does raise a point I've often wondered about -
is CPU speed really that important, if one is not a gamer or similar?
This machine is actually only used as a server,
serving (externally) httpd, mysql, php and openldap.
As far as I can see, the slow CPU speed of the machine
has never had the slightest deleterious effect.
The bottleneck in all cases has been the speed of my ADSL connection
(4Mb/s download, according to my ISP, but under 2Mb/s in practice).
So I do genuinely wonder - does CPU speed matter at all, in such a case?
No, but reliability might. If you chose to serve stuff internally, a
faster disk drive (up to 60 Mbytes/sec) might interest you:-) It won't
go anything like that fast in that box, and I'm not sure whether an
LBA48 drive would work with it. A small one probably would.
fwiw it's most likely to fail after a period of being turned off.
If you don't have a performance problem, adding RAM won't help.
If you do, faster everything probably will, without much thought beyond
brand and budget.
You didn't say how much RAM; it would be interesting to price it and
compare with a low-end server from HP, Dell & Lenovo/IBM (or anyone
else). the low-end server may come with guarantee and on-site support.
New features such as virtualisation may be attractive too.
This Asus motherboard has been remarkably resilient
during its long (9 1/2 years) life.
The CMOS battery expired (and was replaced) about 3 years ago;
and two SCSI disks have gently ended their lives,
in each case giving me due warning of their coming demise.
The question isn't so much whether it can do a useful job, as for how
long it will do so.
I have often thought of replacing it, as I said.
But is there any real reason to do so?
Depends on the uncertain (and unplanned) time if its demise and the
certain (and planned) time of its replacement.
I took a couple of weeks recently visiting daughters in Victoria, and at
the end of the first week there was a power failure here, and part of my
network didn't come back up. Not being able to connect to my desktop was
inconvenient.
When I got back I found the smoke had escaped from a switch and my
office ponged seriously for weeks after.
Whether a newer switch (it was a moderately serous rack-mount affair)
would have survived is moot, but having older gear is a bigger
invitation to such inconveniences.
--
Cheers
John
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