[Wikitech-l] I'm shopping today for upgrades

See notes and questions, below... To give this machine some oomph, I could buy 4 pieces of 1 Gb PC2100 266 RAM for a total of 4 gig for this machine, at $123 each. Then, we could also do a CPU upgrade, I assume any Athlon MP with a 266 FSB would do? The fastest one I see is Athlon MP 2800, $241. This is a Socket A? (Please verify by looking up the motherboard specs?) So that's $482 for new processors, $492 for more ram. And presumably, those 512Mb pieces could be used elsewhere someday? Total cost, then is: $974 This one is a bit trickier, so I suspect that a better route to go with this one would be a motherboard upgrade. After all, a PIII/866 is very tired technology now. I found a Tyan S2462NG (the same as in pliny?) with a single 2800 processor for $585. Throw in another 2800 the same as above, for $241, and throw in the same 4 gig of DDR ram as above, $492. So that's 585+492+241= $1318 to make this machine identical (or anyhow, similar) to pliny. So $1318+974 = $2292 total cost. Since I priced all these things from different suppliers, I'd have to study out the options for shipping costs, etc. But anyhow for $2500, we'd have this stuff for Wikipedia. That'd be a huge improvement, I think, while also leaving us with two nearly identical machines, and thus well-poised for these two to be equal load-balancing frontend webservers in the future, when we may buy a MEGA MONDO db machine. I looked hard at AMD Opteron machines as an alternative. For around $6,000, we could get a pretty decent Opteron machine. But this tech. is so new that the options for motherboards and the like are not very many. For example, it's sort of hard (not impossible!) to find Opteron/SCSI machines -- many vendors are like Penguin Computing, i.e. they are currently only offering a single Opteron alternative, and it isn't SCSI. So my thinking is that we beef up the processors and ram in what we have now, and at the same time prepare for a new architecture in the near future. --Jimbo