Asus Sabertooth 990FX FX8150 32GB memory

[Steevo]

Any issues I should know about with a setup like this? I will be building a new file/client server for work and am planning on the following.

I am going to start moving us to thin clients, and have a 5 year life cycle for a system like this, some users will not be eligible for thin clients, but all that we can will move as PC's come up for retirement.





NZXT Source 220 CA-SO220-01 Black Steel / Aluminum-like finish ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

NZXT Source 220 CA-SO220-01 Black Steel / Aluminum-like finish ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
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Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 3TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 3TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
Item #: N82E16822148844
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ASUS Sabertooth 990FX AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard with UEFI BIOS

ASUS Sabertooth 990FX AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard with UEFI BIOS
Item #: N82E16813131736
Return Policy: Standard Return Policy

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$189.99
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SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 5450 1GB 64-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready Low Profile Ready Video Card ( 100292DDR3L)

SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 5450 1GB 64-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready Low Profile Ready Video Card ( 100292DDR3L)
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PC Power and Cooling Silencer Mk II 750W High Performance 80PLUS Silver SLI CrossFire ready Power Supply

PC Power and Cooling Silencer Mk II 750W High Performance 80PLUS Silver SLI CrossFire ready Power Supply
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G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL10D-16GBXL

G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL10D-16GBXL
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HighPoint RocketRAID 640 PCI-Express 2.0 x4 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) Controller Card

HighPoint RocketRAID 640 PCI-Express 2.0 x4 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) Controller Card
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Microsoft Windows Small Business Server Essential 2011

Microsoft Windows Small Business Server Essential 2011 - OEM
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OCZ Vertex 4 VTX4-25SAT3-256G 2.5" 256GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

OCZ Vertex 4 VTX4-25SAT3-256G 2.5" 256GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
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AMD FX-8150 Zambezi 3.6GHz Socket AM3+ 125W Eight-Core Desktop Processor FD8150FRGUBOX

AMD FX-8150 Zambezi 3.6GHz Socket AM3+ 125W Eight-Core Desktop Processor FD8150FRGUBOX
Item #: N82E16819103960
Return Policy: CPU Replacement Only Return Policy

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Service Net Replacement Extended Warranty

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[MxPhenom 216]

Why get a sabertooth motherboard for a server?

[fullinfusion]

good choices but save yourself the cash on the vertex 4 and grab 2 128GB drives instead.

Ah never mind, I see the prices went up on the Vertex 4's.. I grabbed mine for $114 shipped from Ncix... Your going to like the Sabertooth, great cooling and top of the line components should yield you long time hassle free system.

[Steevo]

Originally Posted by nvidiaintelftw

Why get a sabertooth motherboard for a server?

Lack of issues caused by them just throwing components together as occurs on cheaper boards.

Originally Posted by fullinfusion

good choices but save yourself the cash on the vertex 4 and grab 2 128GB drives instead.

Ah never mind, I see the prices went up on the Vertex 4's.. I grabbed mine for $114 shipped from Ncix... Your going to like the Sabertooth, great cooling and top of the line components should yield you long time hassle free system.

Yeah, it was $209.99 when I added it. I am just trying to figure out what to get, I have three laptops and a couple PC's to replace between now and order time, but I am not aware of any huge changes on the horizon that would change the major components.


My primary concern is the IMC handling 32GB of RAM without issue.

[Aquinus]

If these are going to be mission critical, I would consider not using a consumer grade SSD. Get one that has some over-provisioning so when you start writing to it a lot, you won't kill your SSD too quickly. Personally, I would down-size on the SSD and and go enterprise for that. Then for the RAID card, I would drop that SATA 6gb controller and get something a little more powerful. LSI make a really good 4-port RAID card, but the Marvell controller on the RocketRaid shouldn't bottleneck with regular HDDs. I would just make sure whatever RAID controller you get supports write caching and adding a BBU so you can really take advantage of a hardware RAID card. Definitely not a point to skimp on. I would almost say get a processor with fewer cores and get a nicer RAID card. If this is only going to be a thin-client server and file server, I would drop down to a 6-core and re-invest that money in better I/O. So my recommendation would be drop the size of the SSD (if not the entire thing all together,) and downgrade the CPU and dump some more money into a good RAID card. Most real world server applications will depend highly on I/O speeds, not the number of cores, but that also highly depends on workloads. If people are going to be surfing the web, checking email, and looking at pictures, I would definitely go this route.

For example, I work on a dev server with 16 threads and 24gb of memory at my disposal, but the production server has 8 threads, and 16gb of memory but runs faster. You know why? Because the faster server has 7200k drives in RAID-5 and the other has 15k RPM drives in RAID-5. Only when I write code that does OLAP in PHP do I run into a CPU bottleneck (single-threaded bottleneck I might add.)

So consider the workloads before investing. Also consider if this is running all the time, you may want to consider actual server hardware to ensure stability. A 6-core Valencia Opteron might have what you're looking for if you can find one for a good price and a decent motherboard to go along with it.

Originally Posted by Steevo

My primary concern is the IMC handling 32GB of RAM without issue.

It should be able to handle fully-loaded 1600 fine. Another reason to go with an Opteron with registered memory imo.

[Mathragh]

I can vouch for that mobo. It holds up fine with my 16GB over OC-ed memory, so i guess running 32BG of non overclocked memory should also go fine. When it comes to SSD's, the samsung 830 has software provided with it which you can use to easily reserve any custom amount of space for overprovisioning. I'm not sure how easy it is with other SSDs, but atleast this one is working great.

[Aquinus]

Originally Posted by Mathragh

samsung 830 has software provided with it which you can use to easily reserve any custom amount of space for overprovisioning.

He never said he was using Windows, so that may not be an option. I heard thin-clients, so I assumed (very well could be a bad assumption,) he could be planning on running Linux using LTSP. If you're going to use Windows Server, than I would have to recommend trying Linux with LTSP.

Either way, clarification on what OS you're going to run might impact decisions on what hardware you're planning on using. I find some things run better on Linux and others on (or only on,) Windows.

I've seen 7 people play games on a LTPS server at the same time on a 1gbps connection. It was quite the sight, not going to lie. That was also 6 years ago. So it's definitely efficient. Obviously not very powerful games but they showed 3D being tunneled pretty damn well. I would lake LTSP display compression over Windows any day.

[Steevo]

Our software for business won't run on Linux, it will be running Windows SBS instead of building $700 boxes to run it is more efficient to build $300 boxes and thin clients now, and I spend less time fixing issues for each user and running updates.

I was just taking a stab at a SSD, I like the performance given by the V4, since a lot of what we do is in place database lookups that have their own fetch and in place memory managers that perform poorly a SSD with high performance will shorten searches, and allow more users with less disk queue.


I use the 640 and love it, the two marvell controllers do limit my SSD's a bit, but I am planning on running the 4 HDD's in RAID 5 with hot spare and the SSD on the AMD SATA ports for the OS/cache.

[Aquinus]

Originally Posted by Steevo

Our software for business won't run on Linux, it will be running Windows SBS instead of building $700 boxes to run it is more efficient to build $300 boxes and thin clients now, and I spend less time fixing issues for each user and running updates.

I was just taking a stab at a SSD, I like the performance given by the V4, since a lot of what we do is in place database lookups that have their own fetch and in place memory managers that perform poorly a SSD with high performance will shorten searches, and allow more users with less disk queue.


I use the 640 and love it, the two marvell controllers do limit my SSD's a bit, but I am planning on running the 4 HDD's in RAID 5 with hot spare and the SSD on the AMD SATA ports for the OS/cache.

Fair enough, I assumed there would be a good reason for using what ever you ended up using. I then would recommend keeping everything on the RAID-5 including the OS and only using the SSD for caching. If the SSD fails, you want everything on that RAID-5. It's good and all to save all of your data, but RAID-5 will keep a machine running, even if a drive fails and if the SSD caching works correctly, the first load might not be amazing but every one after will be zippy quick, but if that SSD fails, at least stuff will still load. Additionally it isn't like this machine is going to be rebooted often either. Maybe a caching SSD might be more suitable.

[Steevo]

Backups backups backups.............


Plus my machine will be capable of replacing it, and if I have to keep a bootable partition on the RAID array its fine with 9TB of storage. I am going to build it and keep it at home for a month for testing and beating before deployment.


I thought of a caching SSD, but if I am going to that I might as well get a RAID controller with 512 of its own memory and spend the extra couple hundred on it, but after knowing what a SSD can do VS a HDD.......

[Aquinus]

Originally Posted by Steevo

I thought of a caching SSD, but if I am going to that I might as well get a RAID controller with 512 of its own memory and spend the extra couple hundred on it, but after knowing what a SSD can do VS a HDD.......

I have an LSI RAID card with 512mb of caching memory and it is very nice. I would say ditch the SSD and go with that.

[BarbaricSoul]

Why a 750 watt PSU? A 500 watt PSU should handle that build with no problems and alot less expensive.

[Steevo]

Originally Posted by Aquinus

I have an LSI RAID card with 512mb of caching memory and it is very nice. I would say ditch the SSD and go with that.

The only issue I can see is the extra latetency caused by cache misses, and it is roughly 40GB for the databases installed size and growing. The bottleneck right now is a program client makes a request to the server, the installed program on the server performs the lookup in the databases that are roughly 8GB in file size each, assembles the data and returns it. Playing with number of requests, and watching in use memory, cache hits and misses, and disk queue the program misses over 70 and up to 90 of requests, even when I run the same request from multiple clients. It seems to be written for a 1999 PentiumII with 256Mb of ram and I can spend a few grand on a new server to in crease performance easier than trying to rewrite the software.

Originally Posted by BarbaricSoul

Why a 750 watt PSU? A 500 watt PSU should handle that build with no problems and alot less expensive.

Quality, durability, F@H possibly.....

[suraswami]

If you have MC near by I would get the CPU and board from them. The combo will be $50 cheaper ($40 discount on the combo + CPU is $10 cheaper).

Other choice would be to get the cheaper FX-8120 @ MC which is only $140. Again u will get the $40 combo discount. FX-8120 + Sabertooth + Tax - combo discount comes to $301.

my 2 cents.