On Sat, 7 May 2005, John Gay wrote: > Well, the day is fast approaching when I'll get my Dual Opteron, but now I've > a choice to make. > > I've been quoted aprox 470 Euro +VAT for a Tyan S2885 Motherboard or 260 Euro > +VAT for an MSI K8T-Master2 FAR? > > >From what I can find, I know the Tyan board has seperate memory banks for > >each > processor, as well as a split PCI-X bus, so It's like two complete computers > on one board. Whereas, on the MSI board, the two processors have to share the > memory and PCI bus. > > Also, The Tyan, being larger and needing a special power supply, also needs a > larger and much more expensive case. >
John, opterons are rather out of my league (I was interested in them until I realised how much a couple of 248s would cost - I'm into Cool'n'Quiet) but I'll just throw in a few comments. First, the K8T doesn't use standard athlon64/opteron coolers, it seems to use Pentium4 coolers (lack of space) which may make them noisier. Couldn't find anything definitive on this particular Tyan - thought I'd found it, but it appeared to have a similar memory layout to the MSI. Which brings me to my second point - 4 sticks of memory, but maximum is 3GB (i.e. 2x1GB, 2x512M), just like my athlon64 board. Certainly the Tyan will need a bigger case, but you need to check the power requirements of both boards, I think you'll find they both need a 'workstation' PSU with extra connectors. Ken -- das eine Mal als Trag�die, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
