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Dual Opteron on MSI K8N Master2 FAR

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Fluxburn

Member
Joined
Apr 22, 2006
Location
san jose ca
Well I am planning on my pimp rig coming up here. I plan on using this board I have posted below. I heard the MSI Master was the most prefered board for overclocking, I suppose this one can do oc also. I am going to wait for the new intel chip to come out, so the dual core opteron prices drop (at least I hope). Otherwise I will go with the single cores. Then I will drop a couple gigs of ram, a bunch of 300 gig drives and I was thinking of getting a stand alone sata raid card. I will probably just air cool the thing since I am not sure about watercooling for reliability.


MS-9620.jpg

40211A_OpteronM2.jpg
 
Unless you are going to use dual dual-core, there is no reason to go this route. A single dual-core would be cheaper and more energy efficient. You will need 4 sticks of RAM, and getting NUMA to work is sometimes difficult, and won't provide much benefit unless you need some crazy ammount of memory bandwidth. Also, I'm pretty sure this board doesn't use standard heatsinks. If you do go for it, let us know how it turns out because it would still be nice :)

-Rav
 
Thanks for the info. I think I am waitng until the new intel chips come out for even lower prices on the opterons. I see pairs of chips for $100-200. I found registered memory, 3 gigs for $200. The lagerest expense is the damn board, which is over $200. Numa is AMD terminology for using two processors right? I was thinking of running windows vista beta or maybe server, unless I can run xp.
 
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The MSI K8N Master2 FAR doesn't implement NUMA. But you probably don't need it anyway. If you do, the Asus K8N-DL does do NUMA and OCs very well with ClockGen. Here's a NUMA SiSoft Sandra bench. It's only synthetic, but the score is pretty impressive.

6f8nkz.jpg
 
Some NUMA theory from various sources.

NUMA stands for Non-Uniform Memory Architecture. Each Opteron processor has a built-in memory controller, and each processor in a multi-processor system has its own local memory. Processors are connected between each other with HyperTransport that bears no direct relation to the memory system unlike a traditional FSB setup. Here's a simplified diagram of a NUMA setup.

1043yhj.jpg

In a NUMA system, processors experience low latencies for accessing local memory (especially compared to an SMP system). At the same time, remote memory (belonging to the other processor) is accessed at higher latencies. That's how the non-uniform memory organization term originated. If memory access is organized so thateach processor operates with data solely in its local memory, this architecture has an advantage over a classic SMP solution by getting around the bandwidth limits of the common system bus. The total peak memory bandwidth in this case will equal the double bandwidth of the memory modules used.

But the in order to see any of these benefits, the correct memory access organization is required along with the applications being “NUMA aware”. NUMA platforms therefore must be supported both the motherboard, the OS, and by applications. Both Windows XP (SP2) and Windows Server 2003 fully support NUMA systems. For an application to be “NUMA aware”, the program shouldn't deploy its data in the memory of one processor and then access it from the other processor. This is where “NUMA aware” coding in the application comes into play to make sure the data is local to each CPU (in its direct connected local memory) and available ahead of time in order to enhance the speed benefit.
 
Oh I was looking at this architechture picture on amd's website. Thanks for taking the time to make a diagram. Of course this board doesn't support NUMA, as it doesn't have the dual memory banks, such as the gigabyte models do. I guess I will go gigabyte instead, if it makes that much of a difference.


gigabyte GA-2CEWH commands a higher price, but is worth the extra pennies.
server_productimage_ga-2cewh_big.jpg




But that asus board doesn't look that bad after all, the K8N-DL. I like the 8 sata controllers. I don't like the limited slots. But I might just go with that board. Or I might just go with the gigabyte and a jackload of ram
 
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You should consider the TYAN Tiger K8WE (S2877) or Supermicro H8DCE instead of that Gigabyte board if you'll be going with full e-ATX. BTW, I just copied that diagram from somewhere a while ago. It's used all over the place.
 
Well is one better then the other? the super micro is close to the gigabyte in terms of price and the asus and the tyan board are about the same price.
 
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