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== February 2009 == | == February 2009 == | ||
We purchased 3 identical core i7 940 machines; | We purchased 3 identical core i7 940 machines; the CPU represents the second-fastest currently available (after the 965 Extreme). Check out the benchmarks at [http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results]! | ||
The BIOS has lots of things that one can adjust; at least the IDE mode should be set to AHCI. After installing the 64bit version of CentOS 5.2 we discovered that the network adapter is not well supported by the slightly old installation kernel. So we | |||
The CPU is a quad-core with Hyperthreading, thus appears to the operating system like having 8 cores. The configuration of our machines (with MSI X58 Pro motherboard, 6 GB memory, large disk, and a cheap NVidia graphics card) was established at http://www.hardwareversand.de (I'm not affiliated with this company but I bought my son's PC there, and he's happy with it). The price of such a machine is slightly below 1000,-€, including sales tax and 20,-€ cost for putting the pieces together. | |||
The BIOS has lots of things that one can adjust; at least the IDE mode should be set to AHCI and the C-states activated. After installing the 64bit version of CentOS 5.2 from DVD we discovered that the network adapter is not well supported by the slightly old installation kernel. So we downloaded (from a different machine ...) one of the kernel (plus kernel-devel and kernel-headers) RPM packages from the site http://people/redhat.com/dzickus (at least version 128) and installed those with the help of a USB stick (we also needed the --nodeps option). This "trouble" is the price one pays for cutting-edge hardware - which now works beautifully. | |||