Dual Opteron boards

[glugglug]

Thinking of doing a major upgrade and not liking the Socket 939 pricing. Also, I think single vs. dual channel is going to make a big difference as speeds ramp up, making the 754 out.

I like the idea of a painless upgrade to dual CPU and/or dual core in the future. Or what about an overclocked dual Opteron 242 system now? (Do the lower Opterons overclock well?) Such a configuration would still be cheaper than a single 3500+...

Looking around the 2 choices seem to be MSI with a Via K8T800 chipset board, or Tyan with their AMD-8000 chipset boards.

I know AGP/PCI lock is iffy on VIA chipset - does it work on this MSI board?

Haven't heard much of anything about the AMD-8000 chipset. Does it overclock well? Does it have PCI/AGP lock?

I am very surprised to not see any dual boards with nForce - does it not support it or something?

I suppose I could go with a single CPU Socket 940 board and an Opteron 148 or 150, but what other options am I missing on the dual motherboard front?

 

[Mloot]

I currently have MSI dually board, but there is not an AGP/PCI lock on it, so overclocking options are very limited.

1. Do you need one or more 64-bit PCI slots?

2. Also, what kind of size are you looking at getting, i.e. ATX or Extended ATX?

3. What is your budget for the board?


EDIT: Iwill currently makes an AMD-based Opteron dually board, and their upcoming SFF will have an Nforce 3 250 chipset.

 

[glugglug]

1. No.
2. Either is fine, I always use full-tower cases anyway because I hate the cramped tiny stuff.
3. Below $200 prefered, $250 would be about the limit.

 

[Mloot]

Here's a comparison of a few different dual-Opteron boards.

AFAIK, only the MSI board and the Tiger KW8 are in the $200-250 range. Most other dual Opteron boards seem to be in the $300+ range, since they usually include 64-bit slots, which adds to the cost of the board. One thing that the budget MSI and Tyan Tiger boards share is that they have is that both CPU's share the same memory modules, meaning that one proc must access the system memory by going through the other CPU. This effectively halves the available memory bandwidth that Opterons are capable of. So far, in most applications this doesn't seem to be problem. But, if Windows 64-bit is a NUMA-aware OS, it might start to make a difference. The larger boards and more expensive boards, with their separate memory banks for each proc, are capable of much higher memory bandwidth performance than the two budget boards.

There are a couple of threads over at 2CPU.com that you might find more informative:

MSI K8T thread


Tiger K8W thread

 

[glugglug]

That IWill SFF box looks interesting....

When is it expected? And will you be able to buy the board or derivitaves thereof by itself w/o the rest of that system?

I'm curious, that page says how nForce3 will provide Raid 0+1 support - how do they expect to do Raid 0+1 in SFF?

 

[Mloot]

AFAIK, the mobo will be proprietary, but I can't really say for certain because not too much information has been released.

Here's the latest tidbits I could find. If I read it correctly, it looks like they will offer RAID options with external HDD's.

 

[BGil]

Windows Server 2003 fully supports NUMA and is logically a better choice than windows XP 64-bit because of it's vastly superior driver support and it's superior 32-bit software compatiblity.

 

[CraigRT]

I was actually looking at getting the Tiger K8W.... if anyone knows how to build a good dually board, it's Tyan... my friend has a Tiger MPX and it's still rocking strong with 2 MP's in it... the K8W would be a safe bet for sure. I might for sure consider one when all the prices come down.