need some advice on a dual opteron board

[dannybin1742]

ok so my dad is an engineer, and he owns his own business and they are currently running a dual 3ghz p4 box with 2gb of ram and his problems are taking 36-60 hours to run, on his firends afx53 system running under 64bit linux, the job took 25 hours

so he wants me to build him a dual opteron system with 4gb of ram and i'm at a loss as to what boartd to get

here is what he wants:

2 opterons 2.2-2.4ghz
4gb of pc3200 ram

dual channel ram for each cpu

u320 w/15k hd

the board needs either agp or pciE

it also needs pci-x for the U320 card

i was looking at the tyan k8W but it doesn't look like each cpu sockets has dual channel per cpu, only single (no color coded dimm slots)

so any of you guys who have duallys out there, I need your input, also i have a question, are there dual 939s yet, or only 940 opterons?

 

[Rock Hydra]

MSI Has their K8D Master3-FS">http://www.msicomputer.com/pro...ster3-FS&amp;class=spd</a> that looks pretty good. My uncle uses that board in his server.

Side note: A dual P4 system is impossible as are dual Athlon 64s as far as I know.

 

[dannybin1742]

opteron-A64 same thing

yeah but i'm after opterons just to be clear

 

[dannybin1742]

it also needs agp or pci-e

 

[joelslaw]

I couldn't find any dual 939 boards. 939 is more of a consumer grade socket (doesn't support ECC) so there may not be any. Some thing you should not overlook, is the fact that the other guy is using a 64-bit linux OS. 64-bit cpu's do awsome things when paired with a 64-bit OS. Plus linux is much less of a resource hog.

I think the Tyan board you mentioned: thunder k8w (unless you were talking about the tiger k8w?) is and excellent choice. The board RockHydra11 mentioned doesn't have an agp slot. As far as the dual channel thing, none of the 940 boards I've looked at explicitly say they use dual channel, even the ones with color coded slots. I looked at the k8w user's manual (you can find it on tyan's site) and it does mention something about "128-bit" ram configurations, so I would assume that is what it means, but I'm not sure. At any rate, the difference between the two, isn't all that big.

You may also find this of some use:
http://www2.amd.com/us-en/prot...1,00.html?redir=CPQR08
it's a comparison of all the opterons. Thought it might help since the opteron naming sceme is a bit tricky.

 

[joelslaw]

Originally posted by: dannybin1742
opteron-A64 same thing

not quite. Just found out why there are no dual athlon64 or 64fx boards: the architecture doesn't support it. But in a single cpu system, yes you're right, the FX and the opteron are pretty much the same.

 

[Peter]

Tyan K8W OF COURSE uses both RAM channels on both CPUs. DIMM slot's don't have to be yellow and pink to achieve that, y'know

 

[sechs]

You might want to look into an Iwill DK8X or DK8N.

What kind of video card are you looking at?

 

[Redstorm]

The board for you is the Tyan K8WEX

Dual Opteron
PCIe SLI
PCI-X 100 - 133
Intergrated SCSI Ultra 320 controller (PCI-x channel B)

Thunder K8WEX (S2895)

Processors
- Supports one or two AMD Opteron 2xx processors
- Two onboard 4-phase VRMs
- Three HyperTransport links support up to 6.4GB/s data transfer rate each link
- 144-bit DDR interface (128-bit data +16 bit ECC)
- Scalable 32bit and 64bit computing
- Secure computing with Nx register support
Chipset
- NVIDIA nForce4 SLI Crush K8-04 SLI
- (OPTIONAL) Nvidia nForce4 Crush CK-I/O4 SLI connected to CPU2
- AMD 8131 PCI-X Tunnel
- SMsC Super I/O
Memory
- 128-bit dual channel (Interleaved) memory bus
- Total Eight DDR-1 DIMM sockets (Four per CPU)
- Supports up to 16GB Registered DDR
- Supports ECC with CHIPKill Technology
- Supports DDR400, DDR333, or DDR266
Expansion Slots
- One x16 PCI Express expansion slots
- (OPTIONAL) Second x16 PCI Express connector with CK-I/O4 SLI
- Two independent 64-bit PCI-X buses
* One 133 MHz max PCI-X slot from Bridge A
* Two 100 MHz max PCI-X slots from Bridge B
- One 32-bit 33MHz PCI v2.3 slot
- Total of six usable slots
Integrated I/O
- One floppy connector
- One serial port connector and one 3pin custom
serial header
- Eight USB 2.0 EHCI ports (four rear connectors & four pin headers)
- PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors
- Two FireWire (IEEE 1394a) ports (one rear connector and 1 internal pin header)
System Management
- Total six 4-pin fan headers with PWM and tachometer monitoring
- One 3-pin Chassis Intrusion header
- Watchdog Timer support
- Temperature, voltage and fan monitoring
Integrated ATA-133 (from CK8-04)
- One ATA-133 IDE Channel for up to 2 devices Integrated SATAII Gen.1 Controllers (from CK8-04)
- Two Integrated dual port SATA II Controllers
- Four SATA connectors support up to four drives
- 3 Gb/s per direction per channel
- NvRAID v2.0 Support
Integrated Secure Network Processor (From CK8-04)
- One IEEE 802.3 Nvidia MAC 1000/100/10 Ethernet
- (OPTIONAL) Second Nvidia MAC from CK-I/O4
- Supports WOL and PXE
- Supports Ethernet Jumbo Frames (9018 Bytes)
- Full Duplex Gigabit Ethernet support
- NVIDIA Firewall for secure network communications
Integrated FireWire (IEEE 1394a) Controller
- TI® TSB43AB22A IEEE 1394a PCI controller
- Two FireWire ports (one rear connector and one internal pin header)
Integrated Audio
- Enhanced AC?97 2.3 compliant audio link
- Analog Devices 1981B codec
- Supports 5.1 Surround sound
- CD-in/Aux-in connectors
Integrated SCSI Controller (Mfg. Option)
- LSI 53C1030 U320 SCSI controller
? Two U320 68-pin SCSI connectors
? Connected to PCI-X Bridge B
BIOS
- PhoenixBIOS® on 8Mbit LPC Flash ROM
- ACPI 2.0
- Serial Console Redirect
- USB device boot
- WOL and PXE support
- 48-bit LBA Support
Form Factor
- SSI EEB v3.5 Footprint (12?x13?; 304.8x330.2mm)
- EPS12V/SSI v3.5 Workstation (24 + 8 + 6) power connectors (Split Plane design recommended)
- Serial (one)
- Stacked PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors
- Two dual port USB 2.0 connectors (total 4 ports)
- One RJ-45 LAN connector with LEDs
- (OPTIONAL) Second RJ45 with CK-I/O4
- Audio Line-in, Line-out, Mic-in jacks
- One IEEE 1394A port

 

[Kenazo]

Do remember that for an Opteron system you will need Registered ECC ram. As Peter pointed out to me when I was building my first Opteron system, this is a must (it won't even work otherwise), unless of course they've changed that w/ the NF4 chipset.

Also, Redstorm, your link doesn't seem to work.
Fixed

 

[Peter]

For the 29374513247124612374th time: In AMD64 architecture, the RAM does NOT attach to the chipset. The CPU does that itself. Thank you for listening

 

[dannybin1742]

yes but is that thunder board for sale yet, i have not found it anywhere

 

[joelslaw]

Originally posted by: Peter
For the 29374513247124612374th time: In AMD64 architecture, the RAM does NOT attach to the chipset. The CPU does that itself. Thank you for listening

huh?









I'm not being a smart arse, seriously what were you talking about? Were you refering to the dual-channel disscusion above? So you are saying ALL 939 boards run ram dual-channel? Hmmmm, that makes sense! To bad I had to hear it 29374513247124612374 times for it to sink in

 

[Peter]

29374513247124612375th time AMD64 processors have an integrated RAM controller - single channel in socket-754 flavors, dual channel in -939, dual channel for "registered" DIMMs in -940.

The "chipset", in former x86 architectures the core of the system, has been degraded to be purely an I/O companion. The RAM controllers, former pride and marketing weapon of NVidia and VIA, has become obsolete and is gone. (Except for the SiS 760 chip, which got to keep its RAM controller so that the integrated VGA can be given dedicated memory.)

Hence, discussions like the above "this or that RAM works or doesn't work with this or that chipset" are completely missing the point as long as we're talking AMD64.

The beauty of all this is of course the short path from the CPU to the RAM, but also, with every CPU added into an Opteron system you're getting another twin pair of RAM controllers. RAM bandwidth scales with CPU population, and that lets a dual Opteron system scale its actual performance much better than what happens when you go from single to dual Xeons.

 

[imported_nitrus]

i'd hate to change the specs, but if time is an issue just setup an fx-55 nforce4 system using a pci scsi card. when dual procs and pci-e controller cards come out he can upgrade. having a single 15k drive shoudnt lag too much with pci. at the moment you will be able to run 4GB @ DDR333 but when the new cpu stepping comes out(dual core should support it) the onboard memory controller will be upgraded to support 4GB DDR400. He will probably see an increase in performance of around 5-10% with this setup, and i'd like to say >30% with dual procs, DDR400, and pci-e controller card. this way when he upgrades, at the end of this year or early next year you'll snag a "free" fx-55.