That last bit is very important if you have a hot video card with a large fan, as the large fan ends up sucking hot air back in through those holes, which was a big part of my problem. This case has more than enough fannage to take on any system, having 4 80mm fans aiming at the motherboard tray, as well as 4 80mm fans evacuating air on the drive side. The case is split into two, with twelve 5-1/4 and 3 2-1/2 bays open to the front, with no internal bays. All my drives are in carriers with extra fans. There's 14 total fans. I believe in keeping things cool.
I guess I'd never really messed with a hot video card before, so it never occurred to me there could be a problem. So far as I can tell, only the video card (Sapphire ATI Radeon 3870HD with 512MB ram) and the 3ware 9500s-8 were running hot; the chipset, which is in that area, didn't feel too hot to the touch.
So, I've been using the new Mash, monster mash, for a few days now, and I can't emphasize enough how much faster the 8358se procs are for everyday usage. A buddy of mine and I have a longstanding running argument about faster procs vs. more procs, and I always end up with more procs, due to an inherent personality trait. He always ends up with faster procs, and we compare notes and swap abuse about it, slinging benchmarks at each other like monkeys in a zoo.
The final analysis, in my humble opinion, is that if you actually need more than, say, four processes, then you need more processors. If you don't need more than four processes, then don't buy the bigger system with the more processors, as the latency of a dual socket system eats into performance, particularly single-threaded performance.
I guess I was stunned to find out most people do only one thing at a time on their computer. Sure, they think they multitask, with a little web surfing, music playing and the compiler in the background, or wordprocessing or whatever, and that's the way I used to use a computer back in the day, which is why I always had more than one. However, these new dual quad core systems are a revelation. I've replaced almost every machine with one. The one I haven't replaced is, of course, the Macbook.
With eight cores and sixteen gigabytes of ram running Debian and XFCE, my common footprint is around 3.5GB ram, which is also how much space I'm currently using on the SSD. Because of how I've reconfigured my ram to turn on interleaving and to enable Linux to relocate low memory, I have about 14.5GB available. Subtract the 3.5GB footprint and that leaves 11GB for ramcache and buffers, meaning that the system essentially never reads and absolutely never swaps. Leaving swap on, of course, allows the kernel to more effectively manage memory, temporarily paging something out to relocate large blocks and so on. The swap is around 30GB on two separate swap partitions, one on each 15krpm SAS disk.
Now, this machine used to have a job, but so did I, and now we're both pretty bored. Seems like a lot of horsepower to play hulu, youtube and freeciv, with the occasional light browsing. I occasionally fire up Eclipse and mess with it, but I'm doing far more on the Macbook, learning to write code for the iPhone. I can't do that on Linux. As a result, I can't give you any real performance numbers, comparing, say, database loads on the old to the new, but I can say that the user interface is around 50% faster, that disk access is essentially instantaneous (sorry, hard to benchmark that) and that every thing I've tried to do with it has worked without a hitch, as these procs don't have the wide assortment of bugs the old ones had. It gives me hope for tomorrow.
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