2 Questions

[AkumaX]

1) This article http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=getarticle&articID=399, shows that XP90 ~~ AMD Stock Heatpipe cooler. But I remember someone saying that that isn't the case. Anyone?

2) I remember a thread on Dual Core + I/O Limitation, regarding optimal placement of Drives. I think it was Primary Master for DVD burner, Secondary Master for DVD burner, SATA 0/1 (if you got raid or a raptor), and SATA 3/4 for storage. Does SATA 0 and 1 or 2 and 3 share the same "bus"? Is it better to put SATA stuff in 0 and 2 or does 0 and 1 provide another I/O limitation there?

Thanks for reading

 

[wazzledoozle]

In response to the xp-90/opteron heatsink debate, they cool the same using any 80 mm fan. The XP 90 gains a slight advantage when using a 92 mm fan, but it costs more and so you decide if its worth it to you.

Stock, the opteron heatsink's base is pretty rough and it still performs well. If one were to sand it down, it would perform a good deal better I think.

 

[RichUK]

Well usually the first 2 of 4 SATA ports, or 4 of 8 SATA ports on a motherboard, are controlled by the chipset (Nf3, NF4 etc). The others are controlled by a separate Marvell or Silicon Image chip.

I wouldn?t have thought it had any impact on performance other than with the chipset bottlenecking performance if overloaded with simultaneous I/O traffic and processing of its on die controllers (IDE + SATA + RAID etc). Maybe it is better for performance if the additional SATA controllers (Marvell SATA controller) handle the SATA channels, and the chipset to just route the traffic. As everything is being channelled through the chipset to the CPU via the HT bus anyway.

Basically with the SATA issue, I think the idea is not to overload the channels with multiple read write requests (aka accessing your primary drive and separate storage drives at the same time). As each request would have to wait its turn, as with separate channels the read write requests could be done simultaneously, then relayed via the chipset over the HT link.

I think the NF4 chipset had two on die controllers port 1 and 2 for channel 1, and port 3 and 4 for channel 2, and the NF3 had one on die controller. Its kind of like having separate IDE channels, and not daisy chaining everything to optimise performance. So raid 0 would benefit more from say port 1 and 3 for example.

Also as the IDE is an inferior BUS, putting your least accessed drives on it would make sense. Unless you do a lot of on the fly CD burning, you would look to dedicate IDE channels to the drives.