Everex gPC2 for $119 with Free Shipping

[foneman]

VIa board

We have ordered 2 of the VIA boards with a very small inexpensive case (total cost $160 including 80 GB HD and 1 GB RAM) and are deploying one tonight. Seems to be handling quite nicely. Small customer though...5 lines and 20 phones.

 

[james]

Below is the specs... Actualy moved my testing over to an AMD 3300 with 1Gig of RAM and seems like the 15min mark may be an asterisk issue... I am scaling my stress test down in a linear pattern to see if I can find the right load level for asterisk. Once I find a level where asterisk doesn't eat it I will load those test parameters back on to the everex.

Note this is a mixed analog/digital environment. We have had great luck with these call rates in a pure digital world so I may dump a dual T1 in to it and see how she floats....



Type: VIA C7-D 1.5 GHz Cache Memory Type: L2 cache Installed Size: 128 KB RAM Installed Size: 512 MB Technology: DDR II SDRAM Storage Hard Drive: 80 GB WD

 

[mtennant]

Now the real question is can we still find any of these computers since walmart officially said they are no longer going to sell them.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hVyPFIJPx8NKAzElk21Isx-zQxvgD8VAQTSG0

Anyone have the Everex in stock?

Merlyn

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=8304655

The link above is for the $199 special. Walmart won't stock it in their stores, but will make it available online only.

Glad to see others rolling their own units from the basic motherboard.

James, it is troubling to see a replication of the lockup after 15 minutes using your test procedure on a much faster machine with more memory. Very strange.

 

[wardmundy]

Somebody ought to try one of these dirt-cheap rackmount systems as well. These little $119 cream puffs should work well as Asterisk servers, too.

 

[merlyn]

Somebody ought to try one of these dirt-cheap rackmount systems as well. These little $119 cream puffs should work well as Asterisk servers, too.

I threw out a few hundred of the 119 dollar "cream puffs" you mentioned myself at work. Nationwide we recycled several thousand of these machines with this exact setup so I am sure they came from us or another large corporations like where I work. We never really throw things out we send everything to a recycling center and direct to surpluscomputers.com it seems who knew ?

I know it was the most dog slow computer we had on the network. It felt like it took hours to boot up with all the stuff we had loaded into them using windows xp.

I do know its a huge case and weights about a thousand pounds (give or take a thousand). Be sure to notice it is DDR memory and not DDR2.

All kidding aside we run all our computers 24 hr a day, 365 days a year with multiple users every day. Most common problem was hard drive death or power supply gone bad while they were in our care. So i would think an asterisk install would go fine but i have never run linux on them.

I for one don't want to look at another one of them ever again

merlyn

 

[wardmundy]

Great story. Thanks!!

Personally, the WalMart Specials are just dandy around our house. We've got two going with a heartbeat. And one of these days soon, we'll tackle real fault tolerance even if we have to invent it ourselves.

 

[cliff]

Anyone know where this VIA combo fits in to a comparison to Intel and AMD processors? I ordered the board from ClubIT last week along with an Antec high efficiency power supply. Any other considerations for setup or cooling?

 

[foneman]

Not sure what happened.....

We tried deploying the VIA board as mentioned earlier but it kept crashing and would not load t*f*t*p and remain stable so we had to revert back. I am convinced, as mentioned in the wonderful training, not to skimp on hardware that you are going to deploy. You will regret it eventually and have probelms. (THANKS GRANDSTREAM!)
Anywho, (rant). I am going to keep testing with other applications.

 

[mtennant]

Let me know if you want to sell any of the systems (assuming it was a load issue and not a defect).

 

[wardmundy]

I have four WalMart specials running without issues so... it's not the basic hardware unless you have a bad board.

 

[darmock]

I also have a couple of them running piaf with AST1.6 8^) Works works works! Course I put 2 gb ram in them. There are both running tdm400 cards with no issues. I have not been able to make them die under load after 1440 calls either.

Now if I could only make flite work under Ast 1.6........

Tom

 

[mtennant]

I have two running (one with Asterisk and one with XP). No problems here. I built my own from scratch.

 

[dghundt]

Prior boxes I have used had irq conflicts causing choppy sound. I had to go into the bios and disable everything I could find to get good sound with my tdm400 card.

Has anyone had to disable anything on the everex pc using a TDM400 card? Or is it good out of the box?

 

[darmock]

you have to disable the sound card and serial and parallel but i do that for all of my boxes. i have had no problems thus far with my tdm400 yet.

tom

 

[sanitycheck]

The Via board in the Everex PC is slightly different from the board you can buy separately from ClubIT.com. The Everex board is a PC2500G, where the ClubIT board is a PC2500E. I've used 2 Everex boxes for projects (PIAF, Win2003 Server), and 2 PC2500E boards for projects (PIAF, Ubuntu Server).

There are a few differences worth mentioning, the E having an edge over the G (Everex).

They do take different BIOS updates. Both do have updates to those I received loaded on the boards I've used so far. The updates are posted here:

http://www.idot.com.tw/en/downloads/

Add-in RAID cards do not work in a G, but do work in an E. I tried both a RocketRaid and a 3Ware, and neither worked in a G board. The G would not load the card BIOS to allow it to boot. I can confirm the 3Ware cards work fine in the E.

The Everex systems would not recognize high density memory modules; 1GB modules with chips on only one side of the module (8 chips) were only recognized as 512MB. The solution was to specify low-density modules. I used a module recommended by Crucial (Micron) Support to fix the problem: CT12864AA53E.K16FK. The 16 at the end means 16 total chips on the module. It's possible the latest BIOS for both boards addresses this density issue, but I no longer have a 1GB high-density module to test. I think this was stated earlier in the thread, but the max memory for both boards is 2GB (2 X 1GB).

The E uses the 4-pin P4 connector from the power supply, where the G does not; I don't know what accounts for this difference. I would think the use of the P4 connector is smarter than not using it, even on a light-duty board like this. It might buy stability in systems where the PS is powering add-in cards.

Although I do not own one (yet), one of the new generation 80+ efficient power supplies would be the perfect compliment to these boards (the PS in the Everex is a standard design). The article below suggests that an 80+ unit must be sized properly to achieve that 80%+ efficiency rating in actual use.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article773-page1.html

For this Via board in many PIAF configurations, that would likely mean nothing larger than a 250W. The article is about a 220W FlexATX design, but Sparkle does make a 250W ATX 80+ unit.

 

[foneman]

I digress....

It seems that My prognosis was a little premature....We ended up with a bad remora card for the Sangoma A200. I have since reloaded PIAF and put in a digium (not too thrilled....lol) and so far...knock on wood. I am going to put this in our retail store for Dundi demos.
Anywho...wanted to post as it was NOT the board. We have put the board in a $24.00 micro ATX from computergeeks.com with a 250W PS and so far so good. Nice and small.
Breakdown:
MB - $60.00
1 GB Kingston - $20
80 GB WD HD - $55
Case - $24
Total cost - $159
Stability - PRICELESS

 

[darmock]

This price of the hd compares favorably to the solid state version I am playing with. 16gb CF card and CF > IDE adapter.
My goal is to test this config with piaf running under load until the CF breaks. So far flawless. Once you get rid of the moving parts your reliability goes way up.


Tom

 

[w1ve]

http://sipp.sourceforge.net/

SIPp is a SIP test tool, free from HP. It can generate more SIP traffic than you'll ever want to mess with. It runs on Linux and Windows, and can generate real call scenarios, with RTP, etc.

 

[wardmundy]

WalMart and NewEgg have a new model of the original 'WalMart Special' in mailorder stock now. It's called the Everex gPC2, model TC2512 (instead of TC2502). Same great price at $199.

 

[Q99]

CentOS and SATA Drives...

WalMart and NewEgg have a new model of the original 'WalMart Special' in mailorder stock now. It's called the Everex gPC2, model TC2512 (instead of TC2502). Same great price at $199.

The new model appears to have a SATA drive, not PATA. Does CentOS support SATA (and therefore, PIAF).

Hey, I'm a Linux novice, so I get to ask such "silly" questions!