Athlon 64FX

Hi Group,

I'm in the process of building some new CAD machines. These will be Athlon
64FX's for the singles, and Opteron 248's for the duals.

Does anyone have any MB recommendations ? Most of the stuff out there is
still pretty new (makes me kinda nervous). There seems to be two chipsets
available, N-force, and AMD. Does anyone know the advantages/disadvantages
of either of these ?

TIA

Mark

 

The tyan mother boards are rock solid. No blue screen or hang ups of any
kind so far.

 

I went with a Gigabyte GA-K8VT800 mb. The chipset in this scored a little
faster than the n-forces in the reviews I read.

It's been very good. No lockups except for the occasional SW lockup.

Jay

 

I swear by MSI for single workstations but they don't have a dual Opteron
with an AGP slot, as the dual Opteron is targeted for server use.

My preference, considering performance, reliability, features, etc. would
be:

MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, & Tyan in that order.

Go to www.newegg.com, they carry them all.

- Eddy

 

Oops, I forgot about the dual Opteron MSI "K8T Master2-FAR" at $207 from
newegg.com. The reason I passed over this is because it doesn't have any
64bit pci slots which I required for my new dual Opteron server, but it does
have AGP8x and all the rest. I would HIGHLY recommend it for a dually
workstation, which I may add to the office arsenal later this year. I run
MSI all the way

- Eddy

 

Hi
I've just had a twin opteron built on the Tyan Thunder K8W board - seemed to
have rave reviews and the guys I use seem to trust those boards for their
servers without any complaints - it's essentially a server board with AGP
support (no USB2 though - weird!). I haven't set it up yet with solidworks,
but will have a play over the weekend - If I get time, I'll run some
benchmarks and the ship in a bottle thing - I'm dying to see how fast these
Opterons run Solidworks and Maya.
Cheers
Deri

 

Why dual processor?

 

I run into the same thing with FEA. I just set the priority of the FEA
solver to low and it accomplishes the same thing.