Been away for awhile, again. I have a new system, and need advice.

[jeepman]

I have a new system, and I am wondering if I should spend the money on it. First, let me start with my current system:

ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
Tyan Thunder K7
Dual MP 2200+
768MB PC2100 DDR
TB Santa Cruz
Pyro 1394DV
Adaptec U2 controller (Tyan onboard U160 disabled)
Promise TX2 RAID
2 WD 120MB SE on Promise
Several other drives for another 60GB

New system:

ServerWorks HE chipset
5 PCI-X slots, 3 64 bit PCI slots
LSI 1010-66 PCI-X U160 Dual Channel RAID controller with 128MB PC133 ECC memory for cache.
Dual 2.0GHz Xeon's with 512KB cache (4-way capable system)
4GB PC1600R memory
8 hot swap slots
Three 18GB hot swap drives, one 18 GB 68pin drive.
Three Hot Swap power supplies.
Onboard NIC and video, no AGP.

OK, many are pounding their fists right now and asking are you F'ing stoned? My problem is, all my stuff is low end, and the high end stuff is expensive. I went away from SCSI because IDE is so cheap, but a 66MHz RAID is very tempting.

Also, the question remains, what will the new system do that my current Thunder K7 won't? For example, how do I get the DV into the "big" box?

One thought is, I have two of the LSI RAID controllers. Is a PCI-X RAID controller worth anything? Also, I could sell two GB of the memory, but I need to keep two because of memory interleaving. If the money is enough, maybe I could buy a couple more drives, or maybe two more processors for a total of eight (4 physical, and 4 logical).

[Flying dutchman]

Great hardware, for a server that is (mouth watering). You'll have a hard time finding the right capture and audio hardware though.

The prob with 64-bit PCI is, ALL adapters have to be 64-bit or else the whole bus runs 32-bit which is not in your best interest...
This means getting a 64-bit PCI Firewire, analog video capture card and sound hardware also (do they exist at all?).

If I were you, my first priority would be to get a 64-bit PCI firewire/USB 2.0 card combo. Everything else such as audio can be "bridged" to firewire or Usb.


There's some interesting USB 2.0 hardware MPEG video capturing hardware emerging (e.g. by Adaptec, se my posting)

[jeepman]

I did some checking and the HE Grand Champion chipset supports two seperate PCI-X busses, so I wouldn't mind slowing down one bus. My other problem which I just discovered is the three 64 bit slots are not fuctional, no power apparently. One problem with free hardware I guess. So, now I need to research PCI-X to see what cards a I would need to look for, 3.3v I am assuming.