We all knew VIA has had a bad rap, but Damn...

[Dr Mordrid]

I know there are also problems when using Promise's PCI/66 capable RAID cards in the 760MPX boards PCI/66 slot.

Sounds like they have work to do on that chipset....

Dr. Mordrid

[KvHagedorn]

Too bad they aren't a larger company, with more resources to devote to chipsets and such. From what I gather, Hammer has been priority #1, 2, and 3 there recently. Let's hope Hammer chipsets are at least #4.

[Dr Mordrid]

AMD has two chipsets coming for the Hammer's; 8131 (Q4/02) and 8151 (Q1/03).

SiS has at least two Hammer chipsets; the 755 (Q4/02) & the 760 (Q1/03 w/integrated graphics).

VIA also has two chipsets; K8T333 and K8M333, both slated for Q4/02 and the latter with integrated graphics.

nVIDIA has one chipset for the Hammers in their timeline; Crush K8. Date uncertain.

Dr. Mordrid

[MultimediaMan]

I am positive the ATI Radeon 7000 PCI cards are fully 66 MHz compliant.

The Chaintechs have FEWER issues than most of the other Dual AMDs out there....I am firmly of the opinion this is because they chose to be last to market (Offically, at least) because they waited for the B2 Southbridge Chipset revision before releasing the board to market.

They avoided the ATI Radeon BIOS bugs that Tyan still have yet to fully resolve.

Every 760 MPX boardmaker has had issues with the 64 bit/66MHz bus. Not all SCSI cards, High Speed NICs (My 64Bit Adaptec Dual Port and Single Port 10/100 NICs tanked the board.) and RAID adapters are working on it as they should. AMD seems to think it is a BIOS issue of some kind. Let's hope so.

FWIW: The AMD760MPX chipset is a 3 PCI Bus chipset; PCI0 is the 33MHz 32Bit segment, PCI1 is the 66MHz 32 Bit AGP Segment, and PCI2 is the 66MHz/64Bit Segment.

Oddly enough, if you DON'T have an AGP card in the system, the 64 Bit Segment seems to work much better.

YMMV.

[KvHagedorn]

Originally posted by Dr Mordrid
AMD has two chipsets coming for the Hammer's; 8131 (Q4/02) and 8151 (Q1/03).

SiS has at least two Hammer chipsets; the 755 (Q4/02) & the 760 (Q1/03 w/integrated graphics).

VIA also has two chipsets; K8T333 and K8M333, both slated for Q4/02 and the latter with integrated graphics.

nVIDIA has one chipset for the Hammers in their timeline; Crush K8. Date uncertain.

Dr. Mordrid

I know they are coming.. but I would really like to be able to expect an Intel-quality chipset out of AMD, hence my lament for lack of resources.. The company really needs to prioritize chipsets and support more to get the big IT customers interested.

[Dr Mordrid]

Hopefully this gets worked out as I was going to get a 760MPX board for its PCI/66 slots until this stuff came out. Pity....

Dr. Mordrid

[DGhost]

last i checked AMD's chipset was really a collection of 3, two of which you mentioned (the AGP 3.0 Tunnel (AMD-8151) and the PCI-X tunnel (AMD-8131 - and it supports 2 PCI-X bus channels)) - the third of which is their updated southbridge (the 8111) that supports USB2, integrated 10/100 networking, ATA/133, and PCI 2.2 (32bit/33mhz). on any given motherboard it will consist of either an AMD-8151 or an AMD-8131 paired with an AMD-8111. because of the release dates of the Athlon and Opteron processors, i think the 8151 will be released before the 8131.

In addition you could do a multiprocessor system that consists of an AMD-8151 connected to one processor, an AMD-8131 hanging off of it, an AMD-8131 hanging off of another processor and then an AMD-8111 hanging off of it. this would give the system the capability to handle 1 AGP 8x device, 20 PCI-X master devices (on 4 channels) and then another 8 PCI 2.2 master devices. and you would just have to have two processors in the system.

because of the use of Hypertransport and the memory controller being integrated into the processor, product design should be simplified and *hopefully* they will have a solid implementation for PCI-X and AGP 3.0 on each of the chips.

MultimediaMan:

Having worked with Chaintech, and worked with their support in the past, i would not trust any dual processor board they made to work right. like i stated, we had some problems with an Adaptec raid-5 card while in 64bit/66mhz mode until we updated the bios. then everything started working fine. A lot of vendors held off on releasing a board until the B2 revision was released. why? the USB issues were a big thing to many vendors, and there were supposedly other problems with the south bridge that caused vendors to be shakey. Both EPoX and IWill waited until the new revision to release boards, as well as Chaintech.

Its odd that people have been having problems with the 8500 and the Tyans... we shipped several system with Tiger MP and MPX's and FireGL 8800's in them and never saw any problems with them in our testing. we did see problems with the FireGL's and 4GB of ram in the system and some of the early bios revisions, but a later one cleared that up.