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On Wed, Jun 28, 2006 at 11:33:23PM +0300, Jukka Marin wrote:
> Hi,
>=20
> I'm going to upgrade my desktop system and I was offered a dual-core
> Opteron system.  I checked the AMD web site and noticed that the
> power consumption of a 2 GHz dual-core Opteron is 110 watts (!!).
=20
And I thought my 72w 1.4 GHz Athlon-Thunderbird was a heavy drinker.

> What kind of power saving support does NetBSD 3.0 have for Opterons?
> Will the CPU consume (nearly) 110 watts even when the system is idle?
> I want to get a cool and quiet computer, a 110-watt heater doesn't
> sound like my favourite.. :-I
=20
The 5-ish inch square heat-pipe-connected radiator and fan on
the boxes I've seen works effectively.

The cooler (if it isn't actually this model) looks much like
a Silverstone SST-NT06.

These boxes are quieter than that 1.4 GHz Athlon box I've got.

However, compare any of these power-hungry boxes to the Vectra
VLi8 SF .4GHz P2 (only a 90w power supply) boxes I've got and
everything is noisy.

Of course, a VAX 9000 would almost certainly be noisier and consume
more power than any desktop box, and would be able to crush them too.

> Any other comments about dual-core CPU's and NetBSD?  I assume SMP
> works pretty well nowadays?

For the past few months I've had access to a Opteron 170 on an
nForce4 board.  I cannot recommend this combination for running
NetBSD at this time.  Though I hear NetBSD/i386 is more useable
on this configuration.  A 148 on the same mobo works much better.

I'm now (when it's not being occasionally used for its intended
purpose) using the 148-based box.

See my various posts to port-amd64 starting in January.

Also, I think that pthreaded-apps-on-one-cpu-only thing is
still a problem.

	Jonathan Kollasch

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