Help; final check before purchasing Opteron system;

[Hard Ball]

This is the system I'm about to put together, I just want to check and make sure before ordering the parts:

--2 X AMD Opteron 246 ( From ebay)

--2 X HSF
http://www.monarchcomputer.com/Merchant..._Code=130122&Category_Code=64Heatsinks

--Asus K8N-DL motheboard
http://www.monarchcomputer.com/Merchant...&Product_Code=110192&Category_Code=OMB

--2 X Corsair 512MB ECC
http://www.monarchcomputer.com/Merchant..._Code=140622&Category_Code=REG_Corsair

--2 X Corsair 1024MB ECC
http://www.monarchcomputer.com/Merchant..._Code=140751&Category_Code=REG_Corsair

--Antec True550 EPS12V
http://www.monarchcomputer.com/Merchant...oduct_Code=100213&Category_Code=ps-500

--Gigabyte 7800GTX
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814125195
==> I'm not really building a primarily gaming machine, but I do play games some times,
ans several reasons lead me to come to this decision:
1) I would like to be able to play some of the games coming out this fall.
2) I hate buying new cards every year just to keep up, which would be the case if I got 6800GT/X800XL now.
3) It seems, that this card would allow me to move to an SLI setup with another identical card, if I decide to build a gaming rig sometime in the next two years, and buy a much less expensive card for the opteron build.
4) Some people suggested wait and see when R520 comes out; but the latest reports I heard are that R520 is delayed, and that even if it's on time, it will have very little availability at launch; I simply cannot wait much past the end of July.
5) As many mentioned, especially at anandtech, Geforce cards will work better with linux, while ATI cards are traditionally troublesome in this respect. ( I havn't had much experience with ATI, so I rely on the experience of others here)
6) I posted a poll in the AV forum of arstechnica, got only a few response; I posted at this forum, which got really good response about which card I should go with,
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=31&threadid=1629942&viewresults=y
and youguys overwhelmingly voted for either going with the 7800GTX, or wait for the R520 first. Since I don't think I can wait for the R520 due to recent news, I think this would be the concensus choice of most.

Am I jumping off the deep end here?? If someone thinks that I am making a huge mistake, please speak up, I'm all ears about alternative line of reason. Please let me know if you find objection to this!!

--Opticals, HDDs, Case, Sound Card, Wireless, I already have

--Of course, I will add on some miscellaneous stuff, such as arctic silver.

Does everything look good?

Any glaring mistakes?

Anything objectionable at all??

I will order in the next 48 hours, from either monarch or newegg.
Please let me know, and thanks a bunch.

 

[Boogak]

Nice setup, however I recommend replacing the K8N-DL with a Tyan K8SE, which you can find on ebay for about the same price as the K8N-DL. I have the K8N-DL and I've been less than impressed. There's no temperature monitoring software (Asus Probe and Motherboard Monitor do not work) and there were no 64-bit drivers for the built-in gigabit NIC(even on the cd) or on Asus' website. There also seems to be a widespread problem with the power LED jumpers not working (evidenced by a thread on Asus' forums and which my mobo also suffers from). All in all, while it works great in 32 bit XP, I find these faults annoying enough to not recommend it. You also get more features with the K8SE (2 PCI-E slots, PCI-X slots, more DIMM slots, etc) anyway.

 

[Fieryphoenix]

I went this route, too. For pure gaming power (ie max frame rates) this is not the cost effective solution. BUT...

I chose it as my platform for the next 5 or so years for me. It offers good dual CPU power NOW, graphics performance that won't suck even two years from now, and terrific upgradability over the years. I can replace the processors with dual core Opterons down the line and have four cores (or 8 if AMD makes socket 940 quad cores ever), pop in another 7800, and upgrade the memory to 32 Gigs (I'm at 2 now). Financially, I can pop in a couple hundred dollars once or twice a year, to get a whole system I have historically been able to justify it around, you got it, 5 years.

Unless $100 will break the bank, I reccomend however the board that I got, for these reasons: It has two more memory slots, and supports 4 Gig modules. Not that anyone can affored them now, but it will happen. It also has two PCIex4 slots, and the two PCIex16 slots do not get reduced to 8x in SLI... which perhaps will be important a couple generations down the road for GPU's.

It is actually a SuperMicro H8DCE motherboard, and while they do not officially provide support for it (apparently due to Intel's shennanigans), they both have stated they will provide new BIOSes just like any other of their boards, and there are already FAQs on their site for it. The official provider of support is suppsed to be the vendor you buy from.

The ASUS just got NUMA support, finally (H8DCE and K8WE had it from the start)

There are good discussions about these two boards (and the Tyan K8WE) at 2cpu.com.

Lastly, for peak memory performance, you will want 4 identical memory modules, in order to get both NUMA and dual channel memory effects. Your build could do dual channel with the 512s on one CPU and the 1024s on the other, and NUMA would also work, but the NUMA would not be as efficient as it could be, with the same memory on both processors. And Oh! For Opterons, the only memory timing that makes any difference at all is whether the memory is running at 1T or 2T... 1T makes a HUGE difference, while CAS etc etc makes 1 percent difference or less. Approximately.

 

[NokiaDude]

Why go the server route for gaming? Why not buy a S939 board, like the Asus A8N-SLI Premium, load it up with an A64+ X2 and you're set. I'm not against using a server trype computer, I think its kinda cool. Do you render alot of stuff?

 

[uOpt]

Does the K8N-DL have dual-core support by now? If not I wouldn't take it for granted it ever will.

It also doesn't have enough PCI slots.

I think NUMA will not have a slowdown when you have different amounts of RAM for the two CPUs. From what I see on Linux forums the performance advantage of NUMA is pretty low anyway, but no real benchmarks yet.

 

[coomar]

but with 4 sticks aren't you going to have to go down to 2T anyways?

 

[Crescent13]

no, no, no.

you want two 246's? let me see the 246's are 2.0GHz and 1MB of cache each.
If you get a 4400+, that would be ................2.2Ghz and 1MB of cache each core.

you will get more performance and also the 4400+ is 90nm.

that HSF, get something better like a Zalman 7700 Al-Cu or 7700 Cu

obviously the motherboard will not work with this setup, so get something like a DFI LanParty UT Ultra-D, UT Sli-DR, SLI-D, or Sli-DR.

Get some ocz ram, If you don't mind spending money then get the voltage eXtreme, but whatever you get make sure it is low latency.

PSU looks good, but personally I would get a PCP&C 510 or an OCZ mod/powerstream.

Get a BFG 7800GTX card, those are preoverclocked and have better service.

hope this helps!

EDIT: Just a reminder that you can always overclock that 4400+

 

[uOpt]

Expensive RAM is a waste of money unless you are very serious about overclocking - in which case you probably don't get Opterons in first place.

1T or 2T doesn't matter much in the end, I have yet to see benchmarks where it would.

 

[Hard Ball]

Originally posted by: MartinCracauer
Does the K8N-DL have dual-core support by now? If not I wouldn't take it for granted it ever will.

It also doesn't have enough PCI slots.

I think NUMA will not have a slowdown when you have different amounts of RAM for the two CPUs. From what I see on Linux forums the performance advantage of NUMA is pretty low anyway, but no real benchmarks yet.

It does have dual core support, but requires the latest BIOS update;

It has two PCI slots, and I think (and hope) that this is all I ever need;

Yeah, I know about some issues with NUMA, but RAM timing is not my greatest concern, which is working with large data sets.

Thanks for the suggestions though.

 

[Hard Ball]

Originally posted by: Boogak
Nice setup, however I recommend replacing the K8N-DL with a Tyan K8SE, which you can find on ebay for about the same price as the K8N-DL. I have the K8N-DL and I've been less than impressed. There's no temperature monitoring software (Asus Probe and Motherboard Monitor do not work) and there were no 64-bit drivers for the built-in gigabit NIC(even on the cd) or on Asus' website. There also seems to be a widespread problem with the power LED jumpers not working (evidenced by a thread on Asus' forums and which my mobo also suffers from). All in all, while it works great in 32 bit XP, I find these faults annoying enough to not recommend it. You also get more features with the K8SE (2 PCI-E slots, PCI-X slots, more DIMM slots, etc) anyway.

I think I want to keep the cost at a reasonable level. Also, I currently have a pretty nice ATX case that I would like to keep, rather than spending another 150 USD. ANd A8N-DL is the only one supporting NUMA that would fit comfortably in an ATX case. I don't really need LAN, since my entire house is wireless.

Thanks for the pointers.

 

[Hard Ball]

Originally posted by: coomar
but with 4 sticks aren't you going to have to go down to 2T anyways?

I think that because each of the 4 memory module is hanging off a different channel (2 X dual channel memory controllers), it shouldn't cause much of a problem.

Originally posted by: MartinCracauer
Expensive RAM is a waste of money unless you are very serious about overclocking - in which case you probably don't get Opterons in first place.

1T or 2T doesn't matter much in the end, I have yet to see benchmarks where it would.

That's what I was thinking, I don't think I will be OCing anytime soon.

 

[Hard Ball]

Originally posted by: Crescent13
no, no, no.

you want two 246's? let me see the 246's are 2.0GHz and 1MB of cache each.
If you get a 4400+, that would be ................2.2Ghz and 1MB of cache each core.

you will get more performance and also the 4400+ is 90nm.

that HSF, get something better like a Zalman 7700 Al-Cu or 7700 Cu

obviously the motherboard will not work with this setup, so get something like a DFI LanParty UT Ultra-D, UT Sli-DR, SLI-D, or Sli-DR.

Get some ocz ram, If you don't mind spending money then get the voltage eXtreme, but whatever you get make sure it is low latency.

PSU looks good, but personally I would get a PCP&C 510 or an OCZ mod/powerstream.

Get a BFG 7800GTX card, those are preoverclocked and have better service.

hope this helps!

EDIT: Just a reminder that you can always overclock that 4400+

The most important feature for me for the Dual Opteron setup is NUMA, and the total bandwidth that it affords. I also would like to move to a pair fo Opteron DC next year. The Zalman HSFs, I looked at, but I have some doubts to whether they can fit easily onto that board, which has the sockets unusually close together, maybe you can shed more light on that.

The total cost difference between 4400+ and 246 setups are roughly equivalent, but I think that this is the best choice for me because clock speed is not as important as memory bandwidth on this machine, for the type of work that I will need to do at times. I have wavered over the last 4 weeks about which to go with, but finally decided on this setup because of the former reason, for the possibility that I will have >4GB of total memory this time next year, and for the possible upgrade to a pair of Opteron 270s in the future.

Thanks a lot.

 

[Hard Ball]

Originally posted by: Fieryphoenix
I went this route, too. For pure gaming power (ie max frame rates) this is not the cost effective solution. BUT...

I chose it as my platform for the next 5 or so years for me. It offers good dual CPU power NOW, graphics performance that won't suck even two years from now, and terrific upgradability over the years. I can replace the processors with dual core Opterons down the line and have four cores (or 8 if AMD makes socket 940 quad cores ever), pop in another 7800, and upgrade the memory to 32 Gigs (I'm at 2 now). Financially, I can pop in a couple hundred dollars once or twice a year, to get a whole system I have historically been able to justify it around, you got it, 5 years.

Unless $100 will break the bank, I reccomend however the board that I got, for these reasons: It has two more memory slots, and supports 4 Gig modules. Not that anyone can affored them now, but it will happen. It also has two PCIex4 slots, and the two PCIex16 slots do not get reduced to 8x in SLI... which perhaps will be important a couple generations down the road for GPU's.

It is actually a SuperMicro H8DCE motherboard, and while they do not officially provide support for it (apparently due to Intel's shennanigans), they both have stated they will provide new BIOSes just like any other of their boards, and there are already FAQs on their site for it. The official provider of support is suppsed to be the vendor you buy from.

The ASUS just got NUMA support, finally (H8DCE and K8WE had it from the start)

There are good discussions about these two boards (and the Tyan K8WE) at 2cpu.com.

Lastly, for peak memory performance, you will want 4 identical memory modules, in order to get both NUMA and dual channel memory effects. Your build could do dual channel with the 512s on one CPU and the 1024s on the other, and NUMA would also work, but the NUMA would not be as efficient as it could be, with the same memory on both processors. And Oh! For Opterons, the only memory timing that makes any difference at all is whether the memory is running at 1T or 2T... 1T makes a HUGE difference, while CAS etc etc makes 1 percent difference or less. Approximately.

My thinking is very similar to yours, thanks for sharing your experience. And I agree with almost all of what you have said. About the memory, I will probably get another two sticks of 1GB this time next year, and put them into the slots of CPU0, and I think that should continue to work with NUMA and dual channel. THe memory timing is 3-3-3-8, which is not great, but enough for my purposes.

I may ask you a few more questions about your setup if I should run into some problem with mine, if that is OK with you.

 

[Fieryphoenix]

Hard Ball: Sure, I'll turn on notification then. Not in here much. Feel free to PM me. I do remember people having problems fitting the thing into their ATX cases with the hard drive cages butting into or hanging right over the tops of the CPUs.

coomar: I am running 4 sticks at 1T right now, so no, you don't have to drop down to 2T. I think Hard Ball is probably correct that it's because there are only two sticks per memory controller, but I won't promise more is definately impossible. I'll leave that to the experts.

MartinCracauer: You are pretty much right on... for Athlon64's. For Opterons, the situation is as I said. I don't have time to grab the addy right now, but in the discussion Extreme Tyan s2895 Thread, there is a link to analysis showing so. Warning, the discussion is HUGE (days to actually read through) and there are still some undeleted posts by a [kind/] rather enthusiastic [/kind] bombastic sort of fellow that may hurt the brain to read, but it's in there.

Crescent13: You want to have both CPU slots populated so that you have two memory controllers going. Cheaper to get two 246's (especially older revisions like the C0s, I got my pair for $350 on ebay), now, and two dual core chips in a year or two, than to buy one dualcore now and suffer till then with a half populated board.

 

[Hard Ball]

Thanks FieryPhoenix, I will be sure to PM you if something comes up then. The pieces will arrive in the next 7-10 days, I think, so next weekend would be a good target for build date.

 

[VIAN]

3) It seems, that this card would allow me to move to an SLI setup with another identical card, if I decide to build a gaming rig sometime in the next two years, and buy a much less expensive card for the opteron build.

Yes, Identical, BIOS and board layout, maybe different by then.

 

[uOpt]

Originally posted by: Hard Ball
It has two PCI slots, and I think (and hope) that this is all I ever need;

Just keep in mind that one of the two PCI slots will be blocked by large graphics cards, or most silent GPU cooling solutions.

To me this looks dangerously few, a reduction to one slot. If you end up not being able to use onboard sound, ide, ethernet or USB/Firewire then that slot is instantly gone.

 

[Fieryphoenix]

Fortunately, the 7800GTX is not a slot blocking card. So that wouldn't be a problem for him until he decided to get some as-yet-undreamed-of monster card.

 

[Cuular]

One pretty important thing not yet mentioned, is that the opteron board hooks up the ethernet and ide/sata through the PCI-X bus not the standard IDE like the non-server boards, yeilding very noticeable improvements in speed.

I have both a dual opteron board the tyan K8W and the new DFI UT nf4 SLI-D side by side. The latest test that made the differences in hard disk IO apparent was upgrading the game DAoC on both machines. The latest upgrade for the game was 940MB, yes that is 940 megabytes. I have the exact same hardware in both machines as far as hard drives go. Boots off of 20k scsi drives, games and data on 200GB Western Digital Special Editions with 8MB cache. They both have the exact same games installed on the same partitioned IDE drives. For the record I partition the IDE drives in 40GB chunks.

On the opteron based system using the PCI-X connected IDE it took 25 seconds to patch the game. On the DFI SLI-D using the PCI connected IDE it took 2minutes 35 seconds to patch. Total size of the install directory is around 2GB, so it was checking and updating almost half the files. Both drives were freshly defragged. When I first did this it blew me away, so I removed the game, re-installed from scratch and actually timed it the second time.

Along the same lines, the opteron one uses a broadcom PCI-X connected ethernet card as well. And from all the tests I've seen around lately, while the nf4 based ethernet controller is good, the broadcom one is quite a bit faster.

The dual opterons are 244's (1800) OC'd to 2000. The DFI has a X2 4400+(2200) OC'd to 2550. So although on paper the X2 should own the opteron setup, there are things outside the CPU speed that make a big difference in performance.

And if the OP is going to use this system to crunch on large data sets, he will defintitely see the advantages of a system that uses the faster PCI-X bus for the IO over the PCI bus still used for the onboard controllers on most "regular" motherboards.

 

[Fieryphoenix]

Cuular: Not all dual Opteron boards, in fact, only the Tyan out of the three I've mentioned (H8DCE, K8WE, K8N-DL) has PCI-X. They may however, route NIC and SATA(PATA as well?) through PCIe, which should have much the same effect. But then again, isn't your DFI an Nforce 4 board, which should be doing the same? Or is it only the Nforce 4 Professional that does? Anyway, the point is that it's not the Opteron-ness that leads to those advantages.

I hunted a little through the stupid Extreme Tyan etc etc thread, and found this. It's not everything I remember reading in there about the memory timing issue, but at least it's something hard. If I find another I'll edit this post and put it in.

Okay, first addition: This comes from the page here,
where P4Northwood shows his 1T vs 2T Sandra bandwith results. He gets 9.2% faster with 1T than with 2T, which is an order of magnitude larger than the 1% seen (at best) with low latency modules obtained in the linuxhardware article. Note that this is before he gets NUMA enabled!

Addition 2: A Corsair Memory analysis on a socket 939 system, showing "Command Rate: The results achieved by relaxing the command rate were dramatic. It was found to have the most significant impact on system performance, showing a 3.29% performance decrease when changing from 1T to 2T. To confirm these results, we performed the same analysis using Sandra. To our surprise, we found that of the roughly 17% performance decrease seen in Sandra when changing settings from 2-2-2-5-1T to 3-3-3-8-2T, over 90% of this increase was due to command rate alone!" and "Surprisingly, out of all the memory settings measured in this test, a Command Rate of 1T appears to be by far the most critical."

Addition 3: P4Northwood's pronouncement on the issue. Found here.

"The Opteron Platform uses an onboard memory controller.. Which is located on the CPU itself.. Thus, overall memory performance is dictated primarily through memory bandwidth, or frequency.. Gains in performance on the Opteron Platform are based mostly on HTT increases or memory frequency increases.. The cas timings on the ram play a very small role in total for the Opteron platform.. However, if you were to want to do Video Encoding, or something that is really intense on the cpu's FPU performance, then a lower Latency ram would help this slightly.. Not much, but a noticable difference.. Lets say, instead of a 32sec SuperPI time, it would be more like 31sec..

For strictly graphical purposes, such as AUTO CAD, 3D Gaming, and many other situations that will exploit the systems graphical capabilities, then a higher latency is actually best.. Yielding a more robust environment for pure bandwidth domination of the particular application in question.. Since this board has interested you, most likley due to the SLI capabilities, then feel comfortable with a CAS 3 module which is rated for 1T operation..."

 

[Cuular]

Only the nf4 pro routes the other devices through anything other than the normal PCI bus. The ASUS K8N-DL routes the network port and the 4 SATA connectors from the NF4 chipset through PCI-e. So to correct my statement from my first post above it should have said "through the PCI-X/e bus" But in general with only 20 lanes of pci-e to route, and 16 of them taken up by the graphics card, The non pro versions don't have much left over to route other stuff through. On the DFI's it breaks down to normal, without messing with the PCI-e jumper block 16 lanes to x16 PCI-e 1, 2 lanes to x16 PCI-2, 1 lane to the "x4" slot, and 1 lane to the "x1" slot. By messing with the jumpers you can swap it to 8 lanes to each of the x16 slots and 4 to the x4 slot, with none to the x1 slot. That means that none of the other devices in the system are using pci-e for anything. Meaning disk IO on those boards will never approach the disk IO from a PCI-X or PCI-e of the tyan or nf4 pro based boards.

And of the boards people had recommended here the OP's choice and the DFI one, only the opteron ones out of those choices used something other than PCI for the drive controller. So my recommendation above stands, based on the options being recommended. And I'll assert again, that unless it is an opteron board or based on the nf4 pro chipset, you won't find a current motherboard that routes anything from the onboard devices except the graphics card through pci-e. In the future when the mainstream boards change to include 2 pci-e busses on them, then that will change. Until then, yes it is the opteron/dual opteron motherboards, aimed at the workstation and server communities, that will have the edge in IO, using the onboard device controllers.

EDIT: to stipulate using the onboard devices. Anything plugged into one of the PCI-e slots will of course be using PCI-e. But the point above was that with the supplied devices on the motherboard, only the opterons aimed at the non mass market have IO going through anything other than regular PCI.

 

[Hard Ball]

Thanks guys,

Everything has been ordered, except for the video card;

Which brand would be the least likely to have issues with the K8N-DL board?
I presume the ASUS, right?

Also, EVGA seems to have a pretty good deal going at monarch, with an extra $19 in a package for BF2:
http://www.monarchcomputer.com/Merchant...=190416&Category_Code=nvidia-PCI-E]
But is eVGA a reliable enough brand to worth considering?

 

[Cuular]

I bought the eVGA and it's been a champ so far. I've had it for a whole week, and nothing has died on it yet. As far as being compatible with the motherboard. Pretty much any of them should be, but with it being an ASUS motherboard, you would think that ASUS would have tested and certified their own card on the motherboard.

 

[Hard Ball]

I guess compatibility is the number issue with this build, since I will be running multiple OSes on it, so I guess the safest route to go would be to get an ASUS. eVGA might be fine, but you never know with Linux running and such.

Is BF2 that great of a game anyways?
Anyone's played it before?

 

[uOpt]

be careful with the assumtion that a bord which has PCIe or PCI-X connects onboard devices to anything better than standard PCI.

Just for starters, there are a number of PCIe mainboard which have plain PCI broadcom NICs.

Also, in the PCI-X situation, even if you *are* connected to one of the 64 bit busses, then you might be forced to run a 32 bit card in one of the slots on the same bus as your onboard whatever and it will be slowed down along with the bus.