A8N-SLI Premium PCI BUS Specification

[papaHesch]

Does anyone know the PCI bus specification on this board? Are the 3 PCI (non e)slots 32 bit, 64 bit or both? Can the PCI bus run at only 33MHz or 66MHz? I can not find this information anywhere and would be greatly appreciative if anyone knows.

Thanks,
Papa

 

[SkAiN]

I have the Deluxe version and as far as I know, it's just the standard 32-bit 33MHz PCI slots housed on the board. The only difference in slots between the Premium and Deluxe is the Premium has a PCIe x4 slot while the Deluxe has 2 x1's.

Hope this helps you out.

 

[Capt Caveman]

32-bit, 33mhz

 

[papaHesch]

Well that sucks. That leaves us with only 132 MBps for of board controllers. What is the bandwidth of the onboard SATA controllers on the board? I am looking to upgrade to a U320 controller and it looks like the I will have to use the one PCI E X4 lane. I assume this will interfer with using SLI being between the two card? Has anyone used the PCI E for a scsi card/card with SLI? Basically is there enough headroom ontop to connect the two video cards with a third card in between?

Thanks,
Papa

 

[Peter]

In fact, that's a throughput ceiling of about 95 MB/s when we're talking storage controllers.

You won't find any commodity chipset that offers better PCI. You'll have to aim for a more serious workstation board like the Tyan K8WE. This one combines the NForce4pro chipset and the AMD8131 for twin PCIE-16 and twin PCI-X busses. And it's got onboard dual channel U320 SCSI right there (on one of the PCI-X busses, of course).

http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8we.html

 

[papaHesch]

Originally posted by: Peter
In fact, that's a throughput ceiling of about 95 MB/s when we're talking storage controllers.

You won't find any commodity chipset that offers better PCI. You'll have to aim for a more serious workstation board like the Tyan K8WE. This one combines the NForce4pro chipset and the AMD8131 for twin PCIE-16 and twin PCI-X busses. And it's got onboard dual channel U320 SCSI right there (on one of the PCI-X busses, of course).

http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8we.html

Peter,

How do you feel about the PCI Ex 4X lane? I assume it is worth it to go to the GBs range but is it worth the hassle to figure out a way to get SLI to work with a card in between? Like the A8N-SLI Premium board.

Papa

 

[Peter]

Problem isn't so much the card inbetween or the PCIE 4x slot (which is plenty bandwidth for SCSI), but the typical NVidia high performance card covering the slot next to it with its cooling solution.

 

[papaHesch]

Originally posted by: Peter
Problem isn't so much the card inbetween or the PCIE 4x slot (which is plenty bandwidth for SCSI), but the typical NVidia high performance card covering the slot next to it with its cooling solution.

The only problem I see with 7800 (which has a slim cooling solition) is the height of the card and connecting the SLI bridge connector. I question if the video cards are tall enough that the bridge connector will not fit with another card in between. If anyone has tried this with a standard height card (which I believe is 4.2") in between two graphics card in a SLI configuration using the OEM cooling solution, I would love to hear about it.
Peter on a side note what is the bandwidth of a PCI-E 4X slot? I assume it is in the GBs but not sure?

Thanks,
Papa

 

[Peter]

It's more like the graphics cards NEED to be tall so that the SLi bridge fits OVER the inbetween card.

PCIE raw data rate is 2 gigabit per lane (2.5 GHz 8/10 encoding), such that a 4x port would be 1 GByte/s fullduplex raw bandwidth.

This here:

http://www.lsilogic.com/products/megaraid/megaraid_320_2e.html

is about the only commercially available PCIE SCSI card; as you can see, the card itself isn't that tall - it's the cache DIMM. You might have to fit a low-profile DIMM into it to have the headroom for the SLI bridge.

... but I still think you need to have a higher grade mainboard for this to work really smoothly. E.g. on K8WE, the twin PCIE-16 slots and the twin PCIX bus segments all work in parallel, not daisy-chained to each other. Such is the beauty of HyperTransport - if you want to overdo something, you can

 

[papaHesch]

Originally posted by: Peter
It's more like the graphics cards NEED to be tall so that the SLi bridge fits OVER the inbetween card.

PCIE raw data rate is 2 gigabit per lane (2.5 GHz 8/10 encoding), such that a 4x port would be 1 GByte/s fullduplex raw bandwidth.

This here:

http://www.lsilogic.com/products/megaraid/megaraid_320_2e.html

is about the only commercially available PCIE SCSI card; as you can see, the card itself isn't that tall - it's the cache DIMM. You might have to fit a low-profile DIMM into it to have the headroom for the SLI bridge.

... but I still think you need to have a higher grade mainboard for this to work really smoothly. E.g. on K8WE, the twin PCIE-16 slots and the twin PCIX bus segments all work in parallel, not daisy-chained to each other. Such is the beauty of HyperTransport - if you want to overdo something, you can

Peter,

I agree this is my only option and I compared side by side photos and I think even with non low profile dims it should fit but when I went looking for low profile PC133 dims I had trouble finding anything that looked like it would make a difference (THANKS FOR THE INFO). You know any good low profile dims that are 256 or preferably 512 MBs? I agree this might be a little much for the A8N-SLI but I tend to run 5 years with good drives/card and my U160 15K drives with the previous version of that card you mentioned (MegaRaid express 500) is starting to show its age; corruption on the drives, failure notifications, and etc. I tend to go all out with hard drives (being the weakest link for speed) and get two motherboard cycles in between (5 to 6 years). Basically I hate waiting for data intensive operations to finish: merging large VOB files, video editing, loading games, decrypting DVD, and etc. Do you see a better route for this board for hard drive speed vs. storage then the route I am going for about the same dollars?

On a nerdy note:
When you say work smoothly, what problems do you see happening? My understanding was that PCI-E has a separate channel for each slot (major benefit vs. PCI) and if the SCSI card is daisy chained (not a separate channel) with two graphics cards will it cause stability issues, bus saturation, and etc? My knowledge on AMD is just starting to come around being an Intel guy since the X2 I just got, thus will the HyperTrans help or hinder having a direct link to the bus? I assume it would help but I had some real issues getting 4GB of memory to work on this board and settled with 3GB; being a video editing guy this did not make me happy. I completely saturated the memory bus and it pucked all over me even when I underclocked everything with solid LL memory. I defiantly do not want to spend $1500 to have the same problem.

Your the man!,
papa

 

[Peter]

The Opteron architecture has three I/O links (HyperTransport) from each CPU. One is needed for the CPU interlink on a dual-CPU board; the other two are used for I/O. K8WE hangs one NF4pro chip off each CPU, and the AMD8131 dual-PCIX tunnel off another. Thus, you get twin PCIE-16, twin PCI-X, and twin PCIE-4 channels IN PARALLEL.

Whereas socket-939 Athlon uses only one HT link for the I/O. The PCIE-16 slots are actually PCIE-8 and are served by the same HT link as the PCI bus and everything else on the board.

In other words, K8WE gives you three times the I/O bandwidth as any Athlon64 board.

If you've just moved over from Intel architecture, I suggest you read up on this on the AMD web sites. Plenty of block diagrams and stuff right there.

 

[Peter]

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content...workstation_competitive_comparison.pdf

ftp://ftp.tyan.com/datasheets/d_s2895_100.pdf

 

[Peter]

Oh, and twin CPU sockets also double the number of DIMM slots. Of course, for more than 3 GB to be useful, you'll have to go for a 64-bit operating system as well. Serious work requires serious equipment - I said that

 

[papaHesch]

Peter,

Since you are the man, I thought I would pass this by you. I got the above mentioned LSI 320-2E card and I can not get it to work in the second PCIe 16X slot traditionally used for a SLI vcard. I was under the assumbtion that this slot would run at 8x when set in the BIOS to single video card and the EX-Plug connector was disconnected. Is there anything I am missing that would not make the card post. My other option is to cut the end of the 4X PCIe slot in between the two 16x slots so that the LSI (8X) card can fit into the 4x slot. I assume this would work becuase PCIe cards use available bandwidth and are traditionally backwards compatiable in speed. Before I do this I just wanted your thoughts if you think this would work or if you know some how to get the 16X slot to recognize the card. Alot of x's in there.

Thanks,
Andrew