A7m266-d

[Paddy]

I just exchanged my Asus A7V266 + Herc. GF3 Ti500 for a A7M266-D and a ATI Radeon 8500 Retail.

The motherboard BIOS (v1004) thinks that my XP1800+ is infact a MP chip. At the moment I have only tried it with one CPU, but i see no reason why it wouldn't work with two of them.

Has anyone had sucess with two XPs?

[isochar]

There are a lot of success stories when it comes to using the XPs as MPs...

[Jammrock]

Go to the forums at http://www.2cpu.com . They have dozens of threads about the Asus A7M266-D, what problems people have had, how they fixed them, etc.

The main problem people have had is that the dip switches are not all set OFF for full jumperless support out-of-factory. You'll need to sort through all the jumpers and set them off if you want to run jumperless.

From what I read on the forums, there's about a 85-90% success rate of using Athlon XP's in the dual config. There have been a few who couldn't, switched to MP's and had it work fine. Besides that there weren't too many other problems. In jumperless mode the PCIX bus switches to backwards compatible mode without troubles.

Jammrock

[Dogbert]

Athlon MP

A good thing about MP processors is that their multiplier is unlocked...

[Paddy]

Unlocked eh?? That might justify the price difference....

Cheers!

[Wombat]

The price difference is perfectly justified, and I'm tired of hearing people bitch about it. Getting &gt<!>1 processor to work on a system is <B>really f*cking hard</B>. The price paid for an Athlon MP goes towards all that extra engineering and product verification.

Right now I can hear people retorting that "but the XP and the MP are the same processor!" What's your point? When you fly on some jet for your vacation, your $300 seat is no more expensive for the airline than the seat that business traveller next to you paid $1000 for. The difference is that the airlines make their money off of the business travellers, and you're there b/c having your ass in the seat next to them costs them next to nothing, but your ticket lets them recoup some of the cost of flying the plane with an empty seat. Microeconomics 101 folks.

[isochar]

Problem is that the people buying MPs could be buying Prestonia's for the same price.

[Wombat]

Not quite. Besides, why would you want to?

[KvHagedorn]

Not quite. Besides, why would you want to?

Because he's isochar. He's just strange like that (must really be Craig Barrett's mommy or something. )

Don't bother arguing with him, Rob, it's hopeless..

[isochar]

Well, that's *one* reason.

The P4 platform paired with the i860 results in:

- slightly worse performance on business benchmarks (Side Note: My current setup feels faster in multi-tasking than my old TigerMP with Dual 1900+)
- slightly worse performance on graphics editing
- similar performance on 3d editing
- better performance on video editing/encoding
- substantially better performance as a server (due to hyperthreading)
- increasing performance with future software releases (SSE2 apps are rolling out)

All this, while still reaching top-notch stability, compatibility, reliability, and quality. (Something that definately cannot be generalized about ANY of the available MP/MPX boards.)

Price-wise:

2 x Athlon MP 2000 = $476
Asus A7M266D = $212
4 x 256mb DDR 2100 = $280

$968

2 x Prestonia 1.8 = $530
Supermicro P4DCE+ = $404 (Definately worth twice the price of the Asus)
4 x 256mb PC800 = $272

$1206

Should you decide to go with the new Iwill i860 board, you'll have 533fsb support out of the box. And you'll be able to plop in new 533fsb Xeons when they are available. Quality Pc800 will be able to run at those speeds...

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q1/020225/index.html

[Wombat]

- substantially better performance as a server (due to hyperthreading)

Doubt it. "Hyper-threading" (what a bullshit marketing phrase that is) will show about 20% improvement IF the application can benefit from it at all. Since servers generally do the same job all day, there aren't likely to be spare execution units hanging around.

- increasing performance with future software releases (SSE2 apps are rolling out)

More drivel. Great, maybe one or two Photoshop filters will use SSE2. Remember how MMX/SSE/AltiVec/3DNow were supposed to revolutionize computing? Blah.

All this, while still reaching top-notch stability, compatibility, reliability, and quality. (Something that definately cannot be generalized about ANY of the available MP/MPX boards.)

Price-wise:

2 x Athlon MP 2000 = $476
Asus A7M266D = $212
4 x 256mb DDR 2100 = $280

$968

2 x Prestonia 1.8 = $530
Supermicro P4DCE+ = $404 (Definately worth twice the price of the Asus)
4 x 256mb PC800 = $272

$1206

Should you decide to go with the new Iwill i860 board, you'll have 533fsb support out of the box. And you'll be able to plop in new 533fsb Xeons when they are available. Quality Pc800 will be able to run at those speeds...

Top notch stability and quality with Rambus? RAMBUS? You're kidding. Oh, and then you want to overclock your RDRAM. You <B>never ever</B> overclock a server. Besides, the Presonia servers will be using SDRAM, not RDRAM. Check intel's shipping configurations.


BTW, You're comparing faster/more expensive AMD chips to the Pentium chips. Try a slower AMD for better price comparisons.

[isochar]

Doubt it. "Hyper-threading" (what a bullshit marketing phrase that is) will show about 20% improvement IF the application can benefit from it at all. Since servers generally do the same job all day, there aren't likely to be spare execution units hanging around.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1576&p=4

"The area where performance gains are the most likely today is under server applications because of the varied nature of the operations sent to the CPU. Transactional database server applications can see a 20 - 30% boost in performance just by enabling Hyper-Threading. Lesser but tangible gains can be seen on web servers as well as other application areas."

More drivel. Great, maybe one or two Photoshop filters will use SSE2. Remember how MMX/SSE/AltiVec/3DNow were supposed to revolutionize computing? Blah.

Have you seen what DivX 4.11/2 does for P4s? Don't forget that Visual Studio.net has the SSE2 optimizations built-in.

Top notch stability and quality with Rambus? RAMBUS? You're kidding. Oh, and then you want to overclock your RDRAM. You never ever overclock a server. Besides, the Presonia servers will be using SDRAM, not RDRAM. Check intel's shipping configurations.

RDRAM is a lot more reliable than using 4+ banks full of DDR. The yields on PC800 are so high that people are reaching Pc1066 without any difficulty. Even Rambus themselves demonstrated PC800 running at PC1200.

I'm talking about using the above mentioned setups for a server - the dual Prestonias VS the dual MPs. (Very few of us would build a server on an 4 to 8 way Xeon setup.)

BTW, You're comparing faster/more expensive AMD chips to the Pentium chips. Try a slower AMD for better price comparisons.

I know I am, and my comparison is valid for those 1.8's versus the 2000+. 1.8 Prestonias compare quite favorably against 1900+ MPs, and 2000+ are only 66mhz faster. Look here: http://www.digit-life.com/articles/p...smp/index.html

[Wombat]

I know I shouldn't feed trolls but....

You're quoting <B>THG</B> and <B>Anand</B>! That makes it worthless to start with. What's more, your quote from Anand is just regurgitation of supplied marketing sheets.

And no, RDRAM is NOT more stable than more banks of SDRAM. It's not an arguable point, yes I know for sure.

Even Rambus themselves demonstrated PC800 running at PC1200.

So f*cking what? Demonstration means NOTHING. I could demonstrate all sorts of shit running 50% faster than spec. It's called tweaking and hand-picking. If the rimms were that fast, they'd be selling them. Hmm, I don't see them on pricewatch.

If INTEL won't consider shipping RDRAM servers, then why should you? They have 3 Prestonia configurations, the server config has SDRAM. If they were going to RDRAM servers, then why have the E7500, or whatever they're calling it these days?

Damn you're dense.

[isochar]

Is it me, or does resorting to name calling and abusive language eliminate the possiblity that the person is looking at the situation from an objective point of view?

[Wombat]

It's just you.

All I said was that you are dense.