[x86-64] Opteron motherboard recommendations

[Brad Barnett]

On Wed, 20 Aug 2003 16:38:13 +0200
Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de> wrote:

> On Wednesday 20 August 2003 15:31, Brad Barnett wrote:
> > G'day,
> >
> > I was speaking to Bart the other day, and he mentioned that the MSI
> > K8D Master had a memory bandwidth issue on CPU1, but otherwise was
> > very stable under Linux.
> 
> The server boards (K8D Master, Thunder K8S, ...) also have only limited
> use for workstations, because they need special cases (E-ATX), PCI cards
> (3.3V capable) and power supply. They also tend to be quite expensive.
> 

Hmm.  I see no advantages to a server class motherboard for this project. 
A failed power supply is easy enough to swap.


> > Does anyone have any motherboard recommendations for me?  Anyone have
> > any"stay away from" recommendations?
> The Asus SK8N was recently tested in the german c't magazine. They found
> that it doesn't even work out of the box with current 32 bit linux 
> distributions. There is no source code available for the nvidia nForce3
> chipset on it, so you won't be able to use the onboard LAN, IDE and AGP
> connectors in the near future, at least with 64 bit kernels.
> 
> The Tyan Tomcat K8S board (single opteron, onboard lan, vga, 6xpci)
> sounds like a good deal and all the onboard hardware should work fine,
> but it is very hard to find.
> 

I need dual..

> I'm going to order the MSI K8T Master2-FAR (dual opteron, onboard lan,
> agp, 4xpci) today, which is currently the cheapest dual cpu board.
> 

I notice that this only has 4 memory slots, and a single set of memory
slots instead of one for each CPU...

What performance hit will this result in?  Any ideas?  The applications I
will be running are extremely CPU and memory intensive.  Memory bandwidth
really counts here.


> 	Arnd <><
> 
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