Behind AnandTech - 2002 Server Upgrade

Although the AMD Athlon was launched at the end of 1999, it took several months for the politics and uncertainty surrounding the adoption of the CPU to take their course. By June 2000 and the launch of the Thunderbird, the situation had changed dramatically. It took us no more than two months to realize that with the Thunderbird, AMD had a very capable server CPU on their hands; the only thing that was lacking was a true server platform.

In spite of the lack of a true server platform to run these CPUs on, in August 2000, we built four brand new web servers all based on 1GHz AMD Athlon (Thunderbird) platforms.

Motherboard reliability problems plagued our original four servers, which caused us to perform another fairly massive server upgrade just 8 months later. This upgrade saw the introduction of AMD760 based DDR platforms to the AnandTech Server Farm.

The most recent upgrade we published was the migration of one of our aging Pentium II Xeon database server platforms to a dual Athlon MP/760MP setup. This upgrade happened in August of last year and has been able to keep up with the incredible growth our Forums have seen over the past several months. A smaller upgrade that we didn't publicize much was performed a few months ago that took the original dual Athlon MP 1.2GHz setup to dual Athlon MP 1800+ processors and increased the installed memory size from 2GB to 3GB.

Our two remaining database servers (one for the AnandTech main site and the other for our Advertisements Server) remain in their configurations as of January 2001. These will most likely be included in the next list of server upgrades we perform, but for now we had a different task at hand.