***Official Opteron review thread***

[Leon]

Just noticed one at Toms. Reading now.

Aceshardware - Excellent review

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[H
Hands on with Opteron 242 - Firingsquad

NForce 3 Pro

Firingsquad preview
BJORN3D

 

[spanky]

Opteron 240 1.4GHz $283
Opteron 242 1.6Ghz $690
Opteron 244 1.8Ghz $794

 

[Leon]

Pricey, but it's a server targeted chip. We'll have to wait couple more months for desktop version.

 

[astroview]

bump, waiting for more reviews from other sites

 

[Pariah]

On the workstation (Windows) side, Opteron is a pretty fine Seti machine and pretty crappy everything else. Hope they make some adjustments with the Athlon64 like Intel did going from Pentium Pro to Pentium 2 otherwise they could be in some trouble without significant clock boosts.

 

[human2k]

Wow, (2) 1.8GHZ cpus can really compete against (2) 3.0GHZ! BTW, the Xeon's had a 2.4GHZ advantage over the opteron.




Cheers!:beer:

 

[Wingznut]

My first thought... They went back to ceramic packaging??? I wonder why?

 

[mechBgon]

Those new Hammer heatsinks are going to be sweet. No way to put them on backwards, and the hardware looks pretty darn burly.

Performance-wise, that looks pretty good in the target market. Maybe Anand will throw the Xeon DP's and MP's into the mix like he did here.

 

[RaynorWolfcastle]

Nice performance on the 64-bit tests, but the 32-bit tests were a bit disappointing considering that the Athlon64 will have less memory bandwidth. SSE2 performance is, as expected from the preview, a bit underwhelming as it stands right now.

What I really want to see is how these beasts will do on a 64-bit Windows platform.

 

[jm0ris0n]

I want to see higher frequencies!

 

[grant2]

Originally posted by: Wingznut
My first thought... They went back to ceramic packaging??? I wonder why?

You're not alone, Tom sure seemed to harp on it like Foghorn Leghorn... "It's a mystery, ah say, it's a MYSTERY why they used ceramic packaging..."

Refresh my memory, what is/are the advantage(s) of organic packaging?

 

[ElFenix]

wow, thats a lot of pins!

 

[majewski9]

Opteron looks nice from Toms review! Dual DDR is sweet indeed and even at the nominal 1.8 ghz its able to hang in there. Optimizations could really help the Opteron fly as well since SSE2 is probaly not fully used with it and some of those benches. Opteron is probaly going to get AMD out of their current funk. Still Opteron is inteded as workstation / server chip but I think AMD could branch it out a bit. Perhaps we will see Opteron boards with AGP slots and massive OC ing options. That would be so sweet! Oh well we will probaly have to wait until Athlon 64 comes out for that. Still Opteron will make AMD a ton of bread hopefully.

 

[ravedave]

No O/c ... unusual....
Wonder if thats part of the agreement with AMD in getting a server to review...

 

[ElFenix]

Originally posted by: ravedave
No O/c ... unusual....
Wonder if thats part of the agreement with AMD in getting a server to review...

board probably doesn't overclock easily/at all, so in the interest of timeliness it wasn't investigated in any serious fashion.

i wish their image server wasn't being hammered right now, only the first couple loaded up when i read through it

 

[Leon]

Anybody noticed that Tom used 512Mb in his Dual Xeon 3.06 rig vs 2Gb for Opterons?

 

[Wingznut]

Originally posted by: grant2

Originally posted by: Wingznut
My first thought... They went back to ceramic packaging??? I wonder why?

You're not alone, Tom sure seemed to harp on it like Foghorn Leghorn... "It's a mystery, ah say, it's a MYSTERY why they used ceramic packaging..."

Refresh my memory, what is/are the advantage(s) of organic packaging?

Simply put, cost.

 

[dexvx]

Originally posted by: Leon
Anybody noticed that Tom used 512Mb in his Dual Xeon 3.06 rig vs 2Gb for Opterons?

Yea, his numbers are rather confusing (probably the German-English language barrier problems).

The PC1066 and E75xx Systems only used 512MB, the PC800 system (dual Xeon 2.8's with i860) used 1GB.

In any event, this sort of thing needs to be cleared, as in some server and workstation benchmarks, having a large addressable memory is key. But then again, the Opteron uses ECC, which incurs a performance penalty (not that any sane server/workstation wouldnt use ECC).

 

[majewski9]

Well considering this is from Toms I think we are going to have to suspect the entire article as usual. Lets reserve judgement until someone reviews Opteron here or elsewhere. I am sure there will be many reviews up later today. Heck I am suprised by Toms I thought they did a good job with this article.

 

[nagger]

Any knows if AnandTech will post a review a little later?

 

[Nemesis77]

I posted this on another thread, but I'll repost this here:

What's wrong with Opterons memory-bandwidth? I mean, dual-channel P4 beats it, even though Opteron has dual-channel mem-controller as well! And the mem-bandwidth should go up as CPU's are added, thanks to NUMA. Yet, 2x Opterons (that have 4x 64bit mem-channels (2x for each CPU, each CPU can use other CPU's RAM as well)) are beaten by P4 that has 2x64 mem-channels. What's wrong?

 

[First]

Originally posted by: nagger
Any knows if AnandTech will post a review a little later?

9:30am EST.

 

[bgeh]

Originally posted by: Evan Lieb

Originally posted by: nagger
Any knows if AnandTech will post a review a little later?

9:30am EST.

 

[nagger]

Originally posted by: Evan Lieb

Originally posted by: nagger
Any knows if AnandTech will post a review a little later?

9:30am EST.

thanks

that's GMT -5 right?

 

[Idoxash]

9:30am EST eh? *looks at his clock (7:26am EST)* Freak looks like i'm not going to sleep ...

--Idoxash