opteron 146 thoughts on motherboards

[Bryan J. Smith]

Andy Dean <andy at andydeano.co.uk> wrote:
> The supermicro H8SSL-i looks a very good board high end
> wise, and anyting with the nvidia NForce 4 ultra for lowend
> stuff really, very tempted by the asrock board though as
well.

Don't forget the nForce Pro 2200 (and 2200+2050).  They _are_
available in single socket mainboards.

> Does anyone know of a motherboard that supports both Pci-x
> and Pci-e x16 as i've not found one yet.

For single socket AMD, no, not yet.  Only PCIe x8 and PCI-X.

There are several dual-socket mainboards that add an AMD8131
dual-PCI-X 1.0 (or AMD8132 dual-PCI-X 2.0) to CPU #0, while
using a nForce Pro 2200 on CPU #0 and, optionally, a nForce
Pro 2050 on CPU #1.

> Finally probably a stupid question, would there be any
> advantages in running a 3ware 8006-2LP in a standard Pci
slot
> on an Nvidia ultra board, rather than SATA-2 drives on the
> nvidia ultra SATA-2 onboard controller?  i ask as i've been
> offered one very cheap :)

The problem is that the 3Ware will quickly _saturate_ your
bandwidth on the legacy 32-bit @ 33MHz (133MBps) with modern
drives.  The 3Ware Escalade 8006 clearly wants >>100MBps for
itself for reads (in RAID-1, reads/writes in RAID-0), and the
higher port count 8506 products can easily exceed 250MBps at
reads (and over 200MBps at RAID-10 writes in the 8 port
version).

On a workstation, that will kill anything else on the PCI bus
(e.g., audio).

That's why PCI-X is highly recommended for even those older
cards.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith     Professional, Technical Annoyance                      b.j.smith at ieee.org      http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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*** Speed doesn't kill, difference in speed does ***