Choosing the right computer
 

Hi,

I am wondering if anyone can offer advice on what type of computer to buy. We want another NT dual processor workstation to add to our cluster for network parallel processing using fluent. We have pretty much decided on ordinary PIII processors rather than Xeon.

We are unsure however whether we should go with an Intel motherboard or an "off-brand". One choice for an offbrand board is a board made by the Asus company. Can anyone offer any comments concerning the use of boards from different companies? Are Intel and Asus boards of comparable quality.

Also, another choice is to use an Intel STL2 board, but on the Intel web site it says the STL2 has not been tested with NT for workgroups (only NT server). I am concerned that a board designed for use with servers (i.e. multiple users running office applications) will not give maximum performance for the number crunching that we want to do. Is this true?

When we were initially looking for a board, the requirement was that it support up to 4 Gigabyte of RAM. This has limited the choices considerably and is one reason why we were considering a server board rather than an ordinary PC board.

Any comments are greatly appreciated.