Legit Reviews

The Inquirer wrote:This has come to a close, as we have received a document that goes to show that company has decided to stop production of several different SKU's.

Stopped items from AMD for Q4
SDA2500BXBOX
SDA3100BXBOX
ADA3000BPBOX
ADA3200BPBOX
ADA3500BPBOX
939pin Opterons

You can see that the company has stopped production of Sempr0n 2500+, 3100+ and Athlon 64 3000+, 3200+ and 3500+, all in Processor-In-Box (PIB) format. At the end of the list, all Opterons using Socket 939. Is this a preparation for early Socket M2 launch?

The Inquirer (again)
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=28250

It seems to be confirmed

Grab 'em IF you can

Well, the reasoning behind the Venice chips (3000, 3200, 3500) are because AMD has released a new E6 revision of Venice. Instead of "BP" at the end of the product code, it is "CG". This brings them back on par with San Diego for revisions.

And I refuse to pay the extremely inflated prices for the s939 Opterons

They are actually cheaper, just the retailers add on more due to demand.....
I wish I got a Opteron 175 instead of my 4400+...@ the time it was cheaper...(still is, but it now says "Stocked at supplier")

kenc51 wrote:They are actually cheaper, just the retailers add on more due to demand.....

Yeah, I know, that's what I was trying to refer to. Just not clear enough

kenc51 wrote:They are actually cheaper, just the retailers add on more due to demand.....
I wish I got a Opteron 175 instead of my 4400+...@ the time it was cheaper...(still is, but it now says "Stocked at supplier")

Glad I got my Opteron 175 instead of a 4400+.
I mainly got it because I wanted the Opteron after getting rid of my dual Opteron system. Only reason I got rid of my dual Opteron system was due to the revisions of the latest procs. My old Tyan Thunder K8W (I was an early adopter [and paid the price for it]) would not handle the newer chips so to upgrade to the newer chips would have required me to spend $2,000. Why are the revisions so important? Due to a problem with the way early AMD64 and Intel EM64T procs handled the memory allocation, VMWare cannot play with 32-bit/64-bit host with 32-bit/64-bit guests. VMWare is a rather important tool in my line of work.

have you overclocked it?

kenc51 wrote:have you overclocked it?

Tempting to but I'm thinking that I might switch from this Abit board to a Supermicro workstation/server board. I'm running a PCI-X SCSI controller on this system and just today I discovered that Monarch has a Supermicro board with PCIe and PCI-X. The biggest problem I have is that there is never enough PCI slots in these nF boards that are logically placed. My Abit is tightly packed with PCI cards and if I switch to the SM board I will have to move one of my PCI cards to my dual Xeon system which just happens to be a Supermicro board as well.

What cards are you running because we may be able to find you a board that alows for overclocking and everything you need then you get the best of both worlds.... the one problem i can see is finding a 939 board with PCIx.

Peopel are still claiming this is bunk

hahaha @ "sempr0n"

infinitevalence wrote:What cards are you running because we may be able to find you a board that alows for overclocking and everything you need then you get the best of both worlds.... the one problem i can see is finding a 939 board with PCIx.

LSI PCI-X 133Mhz 64-bit SCSI controller (handles two Seagate 15.4krpm 73.4GB Cheetahs)
Creative X-Fi sound card
Hauppauge PVR-150 TV-Tuner

I used to use an AIW video card but the due to being on an antenna the AIW cards are useless for the TV-Tuner; the Hauppauge is considerably better. Plus I found out recently that using high-end video encoding software (Liquid Pro) and the AIW is a bad mix so going with an AIW is a no go for this setup.

The PCI-X card is what really messes up the selection of nF4 boards because many of them have components on the board that are too high and close to the PCI slots which would bang up against the overhang of the exposed PCI-X card's slot connection.

So far the Supermicro board at Monarch could handle most of what I need but definitely no oc'ing.
http://www.monarchcomputer.com/Merchant ... ode=AMD939

I know it will cost you, but you wouldn't think of getting a PCIe RAID card?
I'm sure you paid enough for that LSI card but?



I suspect you won't be overclocking --> We could always swap CPU's !!!!

Mine does 2.6 @1,5v (still trying to find min vcore it will do)
Tops out somewhere between 2.6 & 2.7

Naw, with that LSI card and 15k drives he does not want to spend the $$ to get a new controler, although i would look and see if it would cost you more to buy a board, than it would to buy a scsi card. There is the off chance that you could spend just as much getting a new card and using a 939 platform. I will have to look and see if they make any single socket 940 boards that support overclocking, and pcix, that way you could have dual core and pcix.

I looked at the PCIe SCSI option but the controllers are very expensive and require a 4x PCIe slot. Normally all you find are 16x for the video and then 1x for the rest. I thought maybe a SLI board like the ASuS A8N32 might work but not sure of you can use the second 16x slot for anything other than video. A 940 board that fits the bill for oc'ing and provides PCI-X as well as 16x PCIe is the Tyan K8WE - a $500+ board, that board even has my LSI controller onboard! Hence the onboard is using PCI-X instead of PCI which is very important. However, when I sold my dual Opteron I also sold all the RAM I had which is what is needed for a 940 pin system. That ram was the high-performance 2-3-2 ECC RAM and because I had 4x512 I was able to take advantage of NUMA. I need to run some benches on this system to see how much different it is from the dual Opteron I had. 3DMark has proven to be good going from a 6600GT 8x AGP to X800GTO. But still need to run the unbuffered Sandra memory bench and the Cheetah drives to see how much of a difference the burst rate is. My dual Xeon is running a 133Mhz PCI-X SATA RAID controller and it has a much higher burst rate than the same controller on a nF board that I know someone has.

Just to make it easier to see what I had two months ago to what I have now here's a before and after:
Before: http://members.dsl-only.net/~pointreyes ... system.jpg
After (what I have now): http://members.dsl-only.net/~pointreyes/ga/hsystem.jpg

Yes, I have made some drastic cuts to my system but it oddly enough makes the wife happier.

there is a version of the Tyan K8WE without the LSI controller onboad and 1 GbE...but thas the same PCIx slots, bios etc....but it would still cost alot....

The real question is....Is overclocking worth it with your rig?

Why do you need such a high-end system btw? What do you work @?

With the money you have spent I'm not sure if I'd even overclock!

kenc51 wrote:Why do you need such a high-end system btw? What do you work @?

With the money you have spent I'm not sure if I'd even overclock!

Exactly the reason why I haven't jumped on overclocking the current system just yet.

Why such a high-end system? Well, considering that I'm using a $1,000 video encoding piece of software I find it important to use high-end quality components for it. Plus, I have a rather varied requirement for my systems.
1) My job is cyber security for a large organization and I have to think in large scale.
2) My other job on that job is understanding Windows based servers.
3) I have gone haywire with doing video encoding.
4) My family needs a system for them to use without all my junk on it.
5) I must do testing at home, not at work so I need something that can closely emulate what I have at work - including testing Windows 2003 with active directory.
6) Cyber security requires understanding how to audit with Linux/Unix based systems.
7) I used to be a database developer/web-based front-end programmer and hence the lack of need for a dual Opteron anymore but it affected my taste with hardware.
Thanks to the latest offerings from VMWare, I was finally able to reduce 6 systems down to 3. VMWare now lets me test 64-bit systems while still using a host 32-bit system and now dual proc/dual-core is supported in the guest systems.

I did finally bench the Cheetahs: r/w has improved marginally but burst rate has been cut in half to the speed of a Raptor. I don't like Whining Digital drives and hence no way will I switch to a Raptor.

wow...I'd say keep that system uber stable and don't OC.....

:side note:
You said you can run vmware with support for 64bit in 32bit?
I tried installing SuSe 10 64bit with vmware 5.5 cand it always fails....installs fine normally... (only using trial version, but that shouldn't matter)
Do you need an update or the full version for that support???

Are you sure that 32-bit SUSE installed? With the full version I used (before the last update). 64-bit always failed to installed but 32-bit installed just fine or so I thought it was 32-bit, 64-bit actually installed instead. Using the VMWare forums, I discovered that I had to make a change to the vmx file to finally get the 64-bit install to actually be seen as 64-bit to VMWare for loading (a problem with the NIC defaulting to a different NIC from the Intel NIC that is emulated). Even my wireless connection in my laptop works. However, I did add the PCMCIA Audigy 2 card because the onboard sound was not support whereas the Audigy is. Note that I'm using the DL DVD for SUSE 10 because the CD set has some applications (like nessus and gvim) that I needed missing. Makes me wonder what else is missing from the CD set.

Thanks, I'm using the DL DVD too... (gave the cd's to someone else)
It's not too important, as I have a full install on another drive...+ 32bit on the P4 rig
I'll check out the Vmware forums....
(I just like to test first with vmware incase I destory a full install -> still new'ish to linux)

Got my second 175 today...stepping CCBWE 0546. We'll see how this one goes...