Which dual opteron board...with 32-bit pci and pci-x!!

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[H]F Junkie
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I'm lookign at the IWILL DK8X and the Tyan S2885.

Anyone know of any other boards that are dual opteron, have pci-x, and some 32-bit pci slots, as well as an AGP slot?

The iwill has an agp-pro 8x "50".
THe tyan has an agp-pro 8x "110"

anyone know what the difference is?

Advantages of the tyan:
onboard gigabit ethernet is on a pci-x bux

Advantages of the iwill:
two pci-32 bit slots...

Suggestions welcome.

Rob
 
gotta ask though, do you really NEED two pci-32 slots? sound card is pretty much all teh tyan board needs.
 
Robstar said:
I'm lookign at the IWILL DK8X and the Tyan S2885.
The iwill has an agp-pro 8x "50".
THe tyan has an agp-pro 8x "110"
Click to expand...

AGP Pro comes in 2 flavors, AGP Pro 50 and 110. The 50 and 110 are the wattage that the video card is allowed to pull from the motherboard. Pro 50 requires the AGP slot, plus the next adjoining slot. Pro 110 requires the AGP slot, plus the next 2 adjoining slots.

As a feature, I wouldn't give it much thought when considering what to buy.. I'm not even sure if a Pro 110 video card ever came out.
 
The SATA ports on the DK8X run on the faster bus and the Gig-E is on the pci bus. Other than that and the number of pci slots, the two boards are nearly identical.

There was a review on linuxhardware.org a while ago that showed the DK8X as being slightly faster but the difference was negligible.
 
If I want to put a second video card in there to have a third monitor (this is how I usually run my machine), I'll need at least one 32-bit pci slot (anyone know pci-x video cards ? Didn't think so ;) ). If tyan doesn't have onboard sound (Don't remember off the top of my head ATM), I guess I'll have to pick up a soundcard too.

I'd actually be willing to go with a single processor board if I could get pci-x or 64-bit/33/66mhz pci or PCI-x on the board, but I can't seem to find anything.

Rob

P.S. It looks like a lot of the "major" manufcturers dont even do any socket 940 stuff (such as gigabyte and abit). :(
 
The tyan has onboard sound, but it's pretty crappy, if you want to run dual monitors get a card capabale of dual monitor instead of two cards, i know my x800 can run one dvi and vga at teh time.
 
he wants a thrid monitor, not a second ;)

you could always do USB sound like an extigy or sonica
 
Robstar said:
anyone know pci-x video cards ? Didn't think so ;)
Click to expand...
actually, any 32-bit card should work in a pci-x slot. it's all cross-compatible (meaning it is possible to put a pci-x card in a 32-bit slot or a 64-bit card in a pci-x slot or whatever you wanted) so unless i am sadly mistaken it shouldn't matter whether a card is in a 32 or 64 bit slot, with a few exceptions that are just because the motherboard/video card don't like each other in 64-bit.

i'd go with the tyan board because it has two seperate pci-x buses, so you get more total bandwidth (may not matter too much to you, but if you ever decide to put a hardware raid card in then you would want to buses so you didn't lose performance)

and a usb sound card isn't a bad idea (m-audio makes a nice 7.1 one for $100, and creative has theirs too) but i'd stick to a pci one if you can, just because i don't think that opteron boards have usb2.0 (on all the ports anyways... just seem to remember that from reading the tyan manual) so you'd want to be careful about how much bandwidth you asked for through usb. 7.1 could take a decent chunk all on it's own.
 
pci-32bit cards will indeed work in a pciX slot. i'd go with a pci sound card (m-audio revolution) and say a pci 5200 or three. i'd go for the same of whatever three cards you can afford to simplify driver installs. don't stick yourself with checking for drivers for nvidia _and_ ati whatever you do.

wrt "50" vs. "110" none that you should care about. if you're planning a video card over $1000 then it matters and you should do some research but not otherwise.

what disk system you looking at? it's really one of the most important parts of your computer.

basically, the tyan is your friend. it will do anything you ask of it. skip the onboard scsi though. if you need it get a daughter card.
 
Not every 32 bit card will work in the pci-x slot, it's needs to have the 3.3 volt compatible slot in it. I know this as fact because i cannot put my sound blaster live in one of the pci-x slots on my tyan thunder k8w.
 
sorry i forgot to mention this; thanks for pointing that out defakto. you know how many pci cards have like one little thing and then a wider one and then another like the 1st? the two breaks in the connector indicate compatibility with both 3.3 and 5v pci slots. the tyan 2885 has only 3.3v support. there is one "real" pci-32 slot with 5v support. the incompatibility issue comes with cards which only have one break in the connector on the bottom. these can't physically fit into the other type of slot. look at page 24 of the manual for the 2885. got it? now go back up to page 7. the board has 4 3.3v pciX slots and one 5v pci-32 slot. look at cards you're planning to use and make sure they'll fit.
 
unhappy_mage said:
you know how many pci cards have like one little thing and then a wider one and then another like the 1st?
Click to expand...

Well said!

.B ekiM
 
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