IronBits - PCZ - some hardware advice, please.

[rsbriggs]

( Nice article about dual MOBOs on one PSU. - I'm going to start making and offering the cables for sale, perhaps....)

OK - I'm now intending to move into farming at the next level. :thumbs:

I'd like some opinions about good MOBOs to buy, type of RAM to put in them, type of cooler, and type of processor. (I'm leaning towards 2400+ AMDs at this point.)

MOBO should have LAN on card, video is a don't care, and should lend themselves to tweaking / overclocking some. They should be capable of network booting, so for right now, the nforce2 boards are ruled out.

I want the *maximum* bang per buck - I'm intending to bring up 6 of these over the next month, and tentatively another 6 next month.

[IronBits]

http://www.free-dc.org/forum/showthread.php?&postid=35297#post35297
These are working and performing most excellently so far.
Wasn't able to get the NICs to work under w2k, but the Tech support department said they are able to.
/me shrugs - put win98 on em and presto :)
Have not tried it yet with *nix - VT6103 nic chipset, with onboard video
and it does support boot from NIC with PXE 2.+ and you can change the boot order in CMOS to boot to LAN first :)
Of course, you will want the cheaper ram and ps to get it mighty close to $200 per node, without HDD ;)

[PCZ]

I would recommend the ASrock MB's. K7VM2 or K7VT2
They are very cheap and definitely netboot.
They are also micro ATX.
They most certainly are not what you would buy for a gaming rig or high performance desktop but they are perfect for farming.
You can adjust the Bus Speed in the bios if you want to overclock a bit
The xp2400+ seems a good choice of CPU.

[rsbriggs]

IB, PCZ - use any sort of IM, like AOL, or yahoo? You can catch me as rsbriggs on AOL, or CodeMonkey on Yahoo....

[IronBits]

Sorry, no I do not use any IM products - there is always IRC :)

[rsbriggs]

Suggest an IRC product for Win2k ??

[rsbriggs]

using mirc - but not certain how to use it.... Seem to be connected to server, and seem to be in channel #free-dc....

What is the significane of irc.free-dc.org? A server?
#free-dc is the channel, correct?

[Chinasaur]

mIrc is nice..but it's the Windows of irc..every exploit is written for it. Khaled does repair them as soon as they come out tho.

If you mirc doesn't fit you..might look at:

Try this one - http://www.bersirc.com/

or www.xircon.com... a bit dated..but excellent if you like clean, no-frills interfaces.

IRC is made up of networks. irc.free-dc.org and irc.aknarra.net make up a network. Both nets share the same channels. So no matter which one you log into, you will find same channels and same people.

http://www.irchelp.org/ will give you all the info you ever needed/wanted to know about IRC.

And yeah, #free-dc is the home of Free-DC but #lobby is filled with nice people too that don't necessarily cross-pollinate to #free-dc :)

Luck :)