Need your opinion n something

[Duvie]

I have an offer for (2) 275 opterons for 1020 shipped??? before you get excited they are used and they say "ES"...

I assume that is Engineering Samples...

Besides less resale value later what are my risk???

1) Do I really know if that chip was an intended 2.2ghz chip?
2) potentailly very earler version that may have some issues?
3) are they multi unlocked


I am already assumming I am doing no ocing so I dont care if that is all it can do....

Or should I just get 270's from a reputable dealer?


Also as for my purchase of the other components should I get 4x512mb of registed memory or get 2x1gb sticks??

Do you need 4 to run dual channel for each chip???

 

[GuitarDaddy]

If the prices are comparable I would go for the 270's from a reputable dealer. Besides the concerns that you have listed, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have a warranty on ES chips.

And I think you do need four sticks of ram to get dual channel on a dual proc board, but I would verify with someone else as I've never owned one. Mark can probably answer this one, he's run a dual opty system I think

 

[Duvie]

Well I ended up lining up a deal for an

Iwill DK8X (which can accept dual cores) used ** the main thing is finding an AGP slot mobo***
gainward Nvidia 6800GT w/ artic cooler (which I think I will just resell)
8x512mb of Corsair Low Latency ECC ram
(2) alpha 8051's with 80 to 120mm converters and 120mm fans

All for 600 shipped

Sound good? I only need 2gb but I may populate all the dimms if I dont decide to sell some of the ram...

I will try the HSF since I wont be ocing and see how well they cool out of the gate...



Haven't heard back from the 275 ES guy to make my decision so I have (2) 270's waiting in my save quote box at monarch waiting for me to hit buy....

My 600 powerstream is ready to go with all the needed plugs (I double checked)
case is a full tower and wiull hold the E-ATX...
I have winxp-pro and ready to go

I think I am going to pick up a 250-300gb SATA HDD or get (2) 160's to 200 and put them into a RAID array

 

[RichUK]

You will indeed need four sticks occupied in the correct slots, if you want to run dual channel mem configs on both processors. The two processors share the total installed memory via the HT link.

It looks your have already decided to go with the 270?s, this is also what I would have recommend, for the same reasons GuitarDaddy outlined.

This should be a sweet rig, what would it be intended for, multimedia CAD work?

 

[Duvie]

I will use it for animating my 3d designs....I show a hefty increase now with a dual core and the program is multithreaded to take advantage of more cores....I likely will be doing some FH all the time or at least on some of the cores....

I will see if it helps me in som eof my encoding apps...

There will be some nic ereviews and benches to come out of this for the AT community I hope....



Is there any penalty to populate all 8 dimms?? 4 per bank...will that force me to use 2t, or cause it is already ECC registered ram I am already taking a slight penalty...I only need 2gb max so if there is a penalty I will resell the rest...

 

[RichUK]

I believe so, although I am not certain. Although the memory controller is tweaked for the use of ECC RAM with its 72bit, 8bit parity mem controllers, I don?t believe it to be any different from the current mem controller performance seen on the current AMD A64 range.

So if this holds true which I am pretty certain it does, populating all four DIMM slots for each individual processor will incur the 2T penalty, and possibly a drop to PC2700 mem speeds. Although I doubt the latter if the 270?s which you purchase be using the later rev cores.

 

[Duvie]

I am sure it is part of the new core that does not inact the pc2700 penalty like winchetser/clawhammer days but more like the venice/san diego chips

selling 2 gbs of the stuff and the vid card will offset some of the cost and makes the items I keep a pretty damn good deal...