[geeks] the biggest, baddest workstation...

[Lionel Peterson]

I've not had problems (but I am a home user of these board, we used
them at $WORK-1, but I can't say I stuck around to hear about
long-term reliability).

Their Tech Support is sane, responsive, and helpful - that is worth
something to me.

As noted elsewhere, I got a BIOS update on a five year-old MB that was
just released in March - that is worth something to me as well.

As for their "high-end" boards, as I said, in the realm of what is
possible, they are pretty tame. I believe dual-socket is as high as
they go, but as a stand alone component there aren't that many
companies that exceed dual socket MBs in the retail market (AFAIK).

I look at Supermico and Intel MBs the same way - they may not have all
the bells and whistles, they may not be "cheap", but by and large they
are reliable and stable.

Of course, YMMV, but given a choice I use Intel in cost-sensitive
builds, Supermicro in long-term investment builds (ideally with their
chassis and MBs together), but I'm always open to other boards.

Lionel

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 11:37 PM, Nadine Miller <velociraptor at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On May 14, 2009, at 4:29 AM, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>
>> On May 13, 2009, at 7:16 PM, "Jonathan J. M. Katz" <jon at jonworld.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> What's the biggest, baddest workstation one can build these days?
>>>
>>> I figure 16 cores (4x4) in some shade of Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron. Who
>>> sells 'em?
>>>
>>> Just curious...
>>
>> I'd second SuperMicro, they sell workstation SuperServers with case, PS,
>> and MB installed, but on an absolute scale of what's possible, they are
>> likely pretty tame.
>>
>> On a side note, I just downloaded a new BIOS for an older SuperMicro MB, a
>> PDSGE, to handle 8 Gigs of RAM - the update was published in March of this
>> year, but the MB is at least 5 years old. I was plesantly suprised they
had
>> a BIOS update so long after the board went off-market...
>>
>> Truth be told, I think the BIOS has been around for a while, but in beta,
>> until March of this year.
>>
>> I just breathed new life into a dual-core Intel 930-based system with 8
>> Giga of RAM ($100), and 4x hot-swap trays with a quiet (to me) power
>> supply/cooling system...
>>
>> It's really quite nice, and 8 gigs of RAM can make up for it being an
>> older CPU family.
>
> I hear a lot of negative things in the LOPSA irc channel from other SA's
> about SuperMicro's reliability.  Likewise, I have read many reports of the
> quality of their motherboards going downhill in the last couple of years.
>
> As far as server mobo's go, I didn't look hard, due to the prices, but I
> think the most I saw was 2 CPU boards available as bare boards.
>
> =Nadine=
> _______________________________________________
> GEEKS:  http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/geeks
>



--
Lionel Peterson
lionel4287 at gmail.com