Building a dual Athlon system, suggestions please

[Graham Meredith]

I'm about to build a dual Athlon system, perhaps an XP 1500 system, and I need recommendations of bits and pieces. I intend to use it primarily for for crunching AVI's to mpgs using VirtualDub and TMPGEnc encoder, on Win2k. I already have a P3-450 system for capture, and was thinking of networking it to this future system to do the crunching. The new system will be very bare-bones, but it would be nice if it were compatible with some of my hardware that I already have, if I decide to end up later wanting it as my main system. I have a Matrox Marvel G400TV capture card (I'm aware of the G400 Win2k capture driver issues - that's OK, as I can always make a dual-boot Win98/Win2k system for capture - although I'll lose the dual processor facility under Win98)

I was thinking of getting a Tyan Tiger MP2460 dual motherboard. Does anyone own one, and how do they rate it? Are there any compatibility issues with the board with various hardware? Chipset issues? In the ads I've seen for it, I'm a bit confused as to the type of processors that it uses. The ad implies that it uses Athlon MP server processors. These are a lot more expensive than the XP processors. What is the difference, and can I use XP processors in it? The Tyan website implies not, but only by the use of the phrase "recommended processor". Can I run earlier chips, like 1.2G Athlons and Durons? The board claims to have both AMD760MP and 762/766 chipsets. What does that mean/imply?

It also has a number of 64/32 bit PCI slots, which are longer than normal PCI slots. Are these compatible with the normal length PCI cards?

If anyone is interested in interpreting the specs, here is the Tyan page:

http://www.tyan.com/products/html/tigermp.html

With all said, is there another dual MB for Athlons in a similar price range (about US$300) that people have tried and recommend?


Any help on this would be much appreciated

Graham

[bogieman]

Graham,

I built a dual Athlon system as you are describing using the Tyan TigerMP S2460 MB. I am very satisfied with it and it runs very stable under Win2K and now WinXP Pro. I've got 1.2 Athlon MP's in it so can't answer as to whether the Athlon XP's will for sure work, but I believe they will.

The confusion with the chipset is that it is an AMD-760MP chipset using an AMD-762 northbridge with -768 southbridge. It does not have a VIA southbridge like most MB's using AMD chipsets.

I built this as a video/CAD workstation using a Pinnacle DC1000DV capture board. I replaced a MSI K7T266-R system with this because I could not get the DC1000DV board to install properly in Win2K although it would work in Win98SE. The Pinnacle board works great in the Tyan system with ACPI enabled.

I originally set this up with a Matrox G400MAX and Rainbow Runner G but my CAD program would not render unless I turned off all hardware acceleration in the G400 driver, yet the DC1000DV would not work unless the acceleration was enabled. I switched to an ATI Radeon 7500 graphics card which works great with both. My system is set up with:

Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card
Kingston Network card
Promise Fasttrak 100
Pinnacle DC1000DV
Generic TI firewire adapter
ATI 7500 AGP
512 PC2100 ECC DDR memory in two sticks

So in answer to your queston on the PCI slots they all work with standard PCI cards.

This motherboard is not for overclockers as the BIOS is very limited in what can be adjusted. But the stability of it is worth it.

So based on my experience, I highly recommend it.

Dave

[Greebe]

Early versions of the XP cpu will work on this mb.. later versions will not which is why they don't specifically say one way or another.

GM have you seen any USB (1.1) issues with this MB?

[Graham Meredith]

Dave,
Thanks, heaps for the reply, it was exactly what I was needing to hear. Interesting about your encounter with the G400Max, this implies the same for my G400TV. As I'm not using it for gaming, only for video capture, switching hardware acceleration off may not cause any problems for me.

Greebe,
I found an article regarding your comment of the the early XP's working but not the later. Apparently AMD locked them out soon after they released them, so people couldn't use them for servers, so they could push their MP line of processors $$$$.
I've been reading up some more, but I haven't heard any issues about USB 1.1.
I went to the Tyan website and downloaded the manual and had a look. It actually supports 4 USB 1.1 ports, 2 at the back of the board, and 2 connectors internally on the board, that you can connect a cable to and run them from a front panel board on your case bays.

A review of the board gives a lot of info, especially about running other CPU's other than MP's:

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1537&p=5

and that you can run normal DDR RAM instead of Certified DDR, so long as you only use 2 banks:

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1537&p=3

Overall, I'm pretty sold on the board, and I'm definitely going to get one within the next couple of weeks!

Graham

[Greebe]

It was reciently reported that the 760 chipset has a flaw which causes problems with USB 1.1 compliant devices (or controllers???)... mentioned something about Asus was resolving their particular problem witha USB 2.0 addon card (or something like that... will have to dig up the link) ... was just wondering if you had similar experience with yours.

[RoGuE]

The USB problem is with the AMD-768 southbridge used on 760MPX motherboards. The 766 used on the Tyan Tiger MP is ok USB-wise AFAIK.

I've been using a Tiger MP/Athlon MP 1.2GHz system for a couple of months. Its been running pretty well. One or two notes though - the SBLive! runs ok (crap liveware can cause problems), but the Audigy suffers from audio skipping under Win2k and XP, and does not work at all with my RT2500 set up. Should have known better. A Sonic Fury/Santa Cruz is now in its place Sorted.

Chris.