Question about building Opteron based system.

[jnex26]

I'm going to be departing from my old XP 1700 (Original version) to a opteron soon. I will be using the machine for gaming, CAD, file server, MP3 encoding.

I want to be building a Dual opteron with about 1 gig ram. the only thing that bothers me is the lack of support for ram above 2700. I whish to use faster ram than this but saying that would I have a problem finding ECC above 2700.

Also I'm only going to be buying 1 processor initally then adding another later on (like a month later on) I know this was impossible with the old PIII's (needed to be the same stepping and batch usally) but have they fixed that.

Also what kind of performance can I expect from this setup i'm looking at giving ANY P4 avalible ATM a damn good whipping.

also finally. What is the best board for my money I know the board is not going to be cheap. but i would like the following feature a AGP 8x slot. but I would like to have a board with a gigabit ethernet. and USB2.0

 

[leukotriene]

If you want PC3200, you can always buy an Athlon64 FX. It uses DDR400 natively and doesnt require ECC, though it does require registered RAM.

I would personally wait two months until the Socket 939 version of the FX is released so that you dont have to bother with the extra latencies the registered DIMMs introduce.

Apparently you want a dual setup though, and the FX is not supposed to have the additional hypertransport link necessary for that function, so if you think you need duals, you must accept registered ECC PC2700.

You can run a single opteron in a dually box perfectly AFAIK.

 

[Deadlierchair]

I'm pretty sure there are only two good options: both MSI and Tyan make boards that fit this description, but I'd get the MSI. It performs a tad bit worse, but costs like 1/2 as much and is still a great board with all the modern features you could ask for. If I had the money, I would have a dual opteron on an MSI board.

 

[stewartjm]

I recently ordered a Monarch Computer Systems "combo" consisting of:

a Tyan Tiger K8W mainboard
2 sticks of 512MB Corsair ECC registered PC3200 RAM
2 Opteron 240(1.4 Ghz) CPUs.

Since it was a combo they have in theory put it together and tested it. According to Fed-Ex it should show up sometime tomorrow.

The other mainboard I considered was the MSI K8T Master2-FAR.

The Tyan is around $20-30 more than the MSI board.

Both boards have AGP slots, the 4+0 memory configuration, USB 2.0 (though the Tyan might have less 2.0 ports), and gigabit Ethernet. Both boards lack PCI-X slots. The Tyan board supports 4 serial ATA drives, and the MSI 2. The MSI board has a VIA chipset, the Tyan board has an AMD chipset.

Both boards are the standard ATX size (12"x9.8"?) and will work with a standard ATX power supply. They both will also work with EPS12V power supplies. I personally chose to go with an EPS12V supply and ordered an Antec 550W EPS12v supply from ExcaliberPC.

The Tyan board has mountings for "standard" Opteron heatsinks. The MSI board has mountings for some sort of P4ish heatsinks which are included when with the board.

That makes the MSI board even more economical, since you can just get OEM Opterons and be ready to go. But I was a bit leery of possibly not being able to get bigger/better/replacement heatsinks for the board and thus, this was one of the reasons I chose to purchase the Tyan board. Even odder is that the 2 included heatsinks are not identical, this is readily apparent in the pictures of the board at newegg.com

In benchmarks I looked at the MSI board was a teensy bit faster than the Tyan board.
Here is a review of the Tiger K8W that has benchmarks comparing it to the MSI board as well as the Tyan Thunder K8W.

If I had an unlimited budget I probably would have chosen the Iwill DK8X mainboard. It has the 4+4 memory configuration and 3 PCI-X slots. Especially since if I had an unlimited budget I could buy a nice 3ware PCI-X raid card as well as a nice 8 drive raid-5 array of some sort to go with it. Unfortunately I don't have an unlimited budget, so I'll just have to suffer with my Tiger K8W

As to PC3200 RAM. Well they shipped the "combo" to me so it must be working in some fashion or another. According to my research on the 2CPU.com forums both AMD and the motherboard manufacturers claim you need an Opteron 246 or higher to work with/run at PC3200 speeds. Though I saw 2-3 posts posts on the 2cpu forums (one with screenshots from some utility called CPU-z) claiming to have Opteron 240s and 244s working with PC3200 RAM at PC3200 speeds. Also as I was putting this post together I noticed the above linked review claims to be using Opteron 242s with PC3200 at PC3200 (DDR-400) speeds.

Guess I'll find out the truth about the memory situation tomorrow

Oh also you mentioned concerns about steppings. I'm not sure if stepping matters, but irregardless some(all? definately the MSI) boards require that the CPUs have the same vcore, and not all Opterons of a given Model # have identical vcores. See this thread at 2cpu.com for details.