AMD Turion II Neo and K625M880G + SB820M chipset

D

dJabba

Hi

Hi all, I'm fairly new to the entire *nix area, but I got a little experience. I can navigate around, view and edit files and so on. But the whole setup thing is new. I'm sure I'll be able to read myself to what I need there though, so that ain't a problem.

I'm planing to build myself a little home server, primarily for storage but also to run a low usage web and mail server. Besides that I don't have big plans for it (maybe a personal IRC server at some point, but doubtful right now).

I've been looking a lot around for power saving boards and was mainly looking at atom based boards first. But I've always been an AMD fan and I couldn't find matching specs of this board I found on an atom base.

Compared to buying a 6bay prebuild systems (like qnap, synology etc) there is a big $$ saving on building it myself even though I get better hardware (about half cost or more)

The board in question is the Zotac M880GITX-A-E (http://www.zotac.com/index.php?option=com_wrapper&view=wrapper&Itemid=100026&lang=nd). It has ddr3, usb3 and sata3 (6 ports, what i want). And it supports up to 8gb ram compared to the atom's 4gb limits.

It has the Turion II Neo K625 onboard and the K625M880G + SB820M chipset.

I tried a couple searched both for NEO and the chipsets here on the forums, but didn't get many hits. I've also tried a couple other forums around the web without any feedback at all.

So my question is, before I go out and buy a mainboard I end up not being able to use - would this present any trouble with FreeBSD?

I'm going to take out the wifi adapter of the board and disable the onboard sound in the bios, as I don't need that. The gfx adapter on it doesn't matter if it's just recognized as default VGA, cause again it's only going to be a standalone server running in the corner.

Thanks in advance for any feedback (alternate ideas are welcome to)
 
The AMD Fusion processors look to be the direct competitors to Atom. This board should be much higher performance than either Atom 330 or Fusion. Since it's a notebook CPU, it might still be relatively power-conserving.

I've never had trouble running FreeBSD on any CPU. Haven't tried that chipset with FreeBSD, although had one recently with Windows that was pretty zippy. USB3 support is underway but not ready yet, so that's a concern. Would existing uhci and ehci drivers work with it in USB2? I'd want to know before buying.

A board this fast is usually not necessary for a home server. It's also fairly expensive, and part of that cost is for features you wouldn't be using, like the wireless and built-in Radeon 4200. It would make a nice desktop, if the USB support works.

AMD Fusion mini-ITX boards are supposed to be coming out in the next few weeks, so you might want to wait a little while.
 
Thank you very much for your feedback wblock.

Regarding the USB3 support, that won't be an issue for me for a while. I currently don't have any usb3 devices - I'd just like to be ready for them later on. The board mentioned above has 6 usb2 and 2 usb3, so in that area it should still be fine.

And yeah, it's pretty expensive - also one of the reasons I ask around to maybe find better options.

Another reason I aim a bit "too high" is that I plan on keeping this setup for around 5 years (if nothing burns down except a hdd now and then - and you got to expect that on a 24/7 running system).

Btw, if anyone cares, this is the case I'm planning on getting - might have to change it though in case I go for a normal size atx board system instead: http://www.fractal-design.com/?view=product&category=2&prod=42

And thanks again for the heads up on the upcomming mini-itx board releases - going to spread out my ears and eyes :)
 
Fusion Boards

I have this board: http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=qSoDxhM5mAk1F607 with 8 gb of ram. 6HDD zfs raidz pool 1SSD boot an add on SATA card and two additional nics. This was a server board swap out running 8.2RC3 at the time of swap. Nary a problem.

Code: 
CPU: AMD E-350 Processor (1648.04-MHz K8-class CPU)
  Origin = "AuthenticAMD"  Id = 0x500f10  Family = 14  Model = 1  Stepping = 0
  Features=0x178bfbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CLFLUSH,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,HTT>
  Features2=0x802209<SSE3,MON,SSSE3,CX16,POPCNT>
  AMD Features=0x2e500800<SYSCALL,NX,MMX+,FFXSR,Page1GB,RDTSCP,LM>
  AMD Features2=0x35ff<LAHF,CMP,SVM,ExtAPIC,CR8,ABM,SSE4A,MAS,Prefetch,IBS,SKINIT,WDT>
  TSC: P-state invariant
real memory  = 8589934592 (8192 MB)
avail memory = 7818219520 (7456 MB)
ACPI APIC Table: <ALASKA A M I>
FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor System Detected: 2 CPUs
FreeBSD/SMP: 1 package(s) x 2 core(s)
 cpu0 (BSP): APIC ID:  0
 cpu1 (AP): APIC ID:  1
 
Thank you for your reply tms3. I appreciate any feedback I can get to get the best possible solution for me

That is a very nice board as well, and it only cost 2/3 of the one I had looked at at first. Knowing it works flawless with FreeBSD is also very good.

The downside on this one might be, that I'll have to spring for another SATA controller to get 6 drives running in it, so the saving isn't that much in the end.

I'm not in that big of a hurry to get this up an running, so I think I'll wait a month or two before I make my final decision. Seems a lot of new interesting things will hit the shelf after the CeBIT.

PS.: @DutchDaemon, I will try to improve myself and use capital I's when referring to myself (only modification you made I could find, else feel free to PM me)
 
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