Well, and I hate to admit this in public

, for the past month or so I`ve been using Windows XP Pro on the Opteron beastie and running my various Linux distros in Virtual PC 2004 (works excellently BTW). The reason being that I have a single SATA drive installed and my older versions of Linux don`t recognise it properly- even XP needed a special driver disk during installation. I`m also waiting for the AMD 64-bit distros to mature a bit (they are still fairly recent) before a native install.
The rough specs are -
- Dual Opteron 846s (eBay (U.S.) got them for around 250 each, less than 246s, - at the time the U.K. retail price was 900+ each )
- A Tyan Tiger K8W motherboard (doesn`t officially support 846s so don`t try this at home !) - also wanted 8 gigabyte capacity for future expansion.
- 1 gigabyte of OCZ PC3200 RAM (eBay (U.S.))
I mainly upgraded for running virtual machines (though it spends it`s spare cycles doing Grid computing for cancer research) and am very happy with the performance.
For anybody thinking of going 64-bit these are interesting times with new 939 chips from AMD, and chipsets from nvidia - I`ve even heard that socket 940 (Opteron) is going to be compatible with AMD`s dual core chips coming up next year.
Hope that was vaguely interesting !
