Blog on Charlie’s Server

Charlie’s Server is reborn. The previously mentioned replacement hardware came in a few days back, and the new server is up and running. To be honest, the speed (or lack thereof) of the new Athlon 64 hardware didn’t stun me. All in all, though, I think I made an excellent purchase, particularly in terms of bang for buck. It’s stable as anything, and more than fast enough for my needs.

The CPU

I’ve overclocked the 2000Mhz processor just the tiniest bit — to 2050Mhz — in order to push the total bogomips to just over 4000 (real nerds like round numbers). I don’t want to push the machine too much, as I’d instead prefer for the processor to last a lifetime (okay, I’ll settle for five years).

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 15
model : 47
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 2050.033
cache size : 512 KB
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt lm 3dnowext 3dnow pni lahf_lm
bogomips : 4063.23
TLB size : 1024 4K pages
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts fid vid ttp tm stc

So that’s where it stands. I’m a bit upset about not being able to purchase the 1MB L2 cache model, but it was just too far outside my price range. Despite having the same L2 cache as Lina’s Pentium 4 (currently the processor in PowerBox) and just a 250Mhz clock speed increase, it seems to be approximately twice as fast. If I care enough (or am bored enough), I may do some proper benchmarking at some point.

The Memory

The Corsair ValueSelect RAM I bought performs well but not amazingly. It’s rated at 2.5 CAS and some users commented on review sites that they were able to run it just fine at 2. I had no such luck, though I didn’t look into it too deeply. Right now there’s two sticks at 512MB apiece (1GB total) running at 410Mhz (205Mhz DDR) in dual channel mode. Let’s just say I’m satisfied.

$ cat /proc/meminfo | head -n 1
MemTotal: 1027300 kB

The Motherboard

The motherboard is nothing short of excellent. The only thing I’d ask for above and beyond what the MSI K8N Neo4-F provides is IEEE1394 (FireWire). I can always buy a PCI card for that, though (or even PCI-Express if I really need excellent latency/bandwidth.

All of the onboard features appear to work out of the box with the Gentoo 2005.1 minimal amd64 LiveCD. I’m no kernel expert, but I was able to get the kernel working perfectly with everything I need in one shot. I have yet to play with ACPI and CPU frequency scaling (I really have no clue about this Cool 'n Quiet stuff), but I hope to get around to that eventually.

The Results

As for right now, things are working great, and I’m overjoyed with the products and service I got from both of the vendors I went with. I have posted excellent reviews for both of them in the appropriate places.

Finally, I have a stable server that actually works.