Serverworks chip sets

William R. Pearson wrp at alpha0.bioch.virginia.edu
Wed Dec 6 08:47:21 PST 2000


I am seeking advice on some alternative Supermicro Motherboards/Chipsets
for a cluster.

We are looking at the Supermicro 370DLE board, with ServerWorks
ServerSet III LE chipset for the nodes, and a 370 DL3 for the head.
The nodes would then use inexpensive IDE drives and fit in a 2U cabinet.

Alternatively, it has been suggested to me that I should consider the
Supermicro 6010H 1U solution, which uses the 370 DER board with
ServerWorks III HE-SL chipset.  Apparently, this motherboard has 2X
bandwidth to memory, and the board provides 2 100BaseT network
connections, but it requires more expensive (and/or smaller) SCSI
drives and is more expensive (an possibly noisier, to cool the 1U
case).

Earlier discussions by this group suggest that there is not a
significant disadvantage to using IDE drives on nodes, but presumably
there is not much disadvantage (other than cost) to using SCSI disks.

My questions:

(1) Does anyone have experience with the HE-SL chipset?  Are there any
benchmarks that indicate relative performance the HE-SL and LE Serverworks
chipsets?

(2) Alternative motherboard/system suggestions?

Bill Pearson




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