Advice on k8we and opteron 280

[gubar]

Hello,

I currently have a gigabyte motherboard and one dual core opteron 175, 2 gigs, with a 7800gt.

A friend has given me a tyan k8we board and 2 x dual core opteron 280s for it, and 4 gigs of registered ram. I'm going to order a new case, psu and 9800gtx+.

I plan to use the system for 3d applications (maya, zbrush mainly) and it's second use will be gaming.

I wondered, will the performance be worse on gaming that on the old board/processor, not taking into account the gpu? I ask because I've read that workstation setups can be very bad with games due to lack of optimization for 4 cores - could I just set the affinity to just one dual core if this is the case?

Basically, I know it will be better for my work but am interested in how it will fare with games too.

Don't have the money for any more significant upgrades so not really looking for alternate suggestions, just some info on performance please.

thanks

gubar

 

[heyheybooboo]

I think you will be fine - but most likely need a general understanding of dealing with 2P and multiple DIMM banks. Tweaking the BIOS settings (most likely limited) to obtain optimization for your memory is important.

Opty SMP rigs are page-faulting super machines - LOL - and space heaters. Make sure you install the latest version of PowerNow (which is quite effective)

NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) architecture

Each processor package is a NUMA node, which includes one or more cores. The cores within a NUMA node all share an on-chip memory controller. Memory attached to the local controller can be thought of as local memory, and the remainder of system memory is non-local memory.

Every NUMA node can access all the memory in the system, but access to local memory is slightly faster.

More importantly, if each node is making heavy use of local memory, all memory banks are well utilized and all memory controllers are doing useful work concurrently, reducing latencies and increasing overall performance.

Also, the HyperTransport links are free to carry I/O traffic instead of shuttling lots of memory data between the NUMA nodes. NUMA performance is all about maximizing concurrency.

An operating system that supports NUMA will automatically try to allocate local memory for each process that is running within a single NUMA node.

Windows OS NUMA support can be better - the 64-bit version of Win7 is purportedly a good step forward in NUMA.

I'm guessing you are aware of the minimum need for XP pro or 2K pro to recognize the 2nd socket?