Best dual Athlon Mobo?

[MultimediaMan]

Mostly system hangs. When the 64/66 bus is heavily loaded sometimes it will stop responding during heavy I/O operations.

[VJ]

I have sent a mail to Tyan, asking about the PCI64/66 issues and if they have information about the Parhelia compatibility with their mpx-based boards...


Jörg

[Greebe]

I forwarded this page to MMM so he could update ya'll on how his is now working with the new BIOS.

Thought it would be best for him to tell...

[VJ]

Euhm, perhaps a very stupid question, but who or what is MMM ?
edit: is it MultiMediaMan ?


Jörg

[Greebe]

eYup that be him

[MultimediaMan]

The Parhelia works on the Chaintech 7KDD with the 7-11-2002 BIOS!

According to a couple of others, there has been success using IWill's MPX board as well.

[VJ]

Ooh, great news !
Is that with a PCI64/66 card present as well ?
(now hoping for news from Tyan...)


Jörg

[MultimediaMan]

No. At the present time, I have the PCI 64/66 Slots dumbed down to 32Bit/33MHz.

I will be trying a PCI64/66MHz card shortly in conjunction with PCI32/66 compliant hardware.

[VJ]

Thanks !
(could you also test the Parhelia in a configuration where there are PCI64/66 cards present ?)


Jörg

[MultimediaMan]

That's what I'm getting ready to do. I have a couple of NICs and a SCSI card I can try.

[Maggi]

Hi Guys,

I had inital problems on the combination of Tiger MPX (S2466N-4M), Parhelia 128 and Intel PRO/1000 server NIC, which is a 64bit/66MHz device.

Those problems were sort of the system mixing up PCI and AGP bus devices, but now after a few BIOS updates, disabling the onboard 100Mbit NIC, doing a fresh installation of Win2k SP3 and NOT installing AMD BM drivers (I use a Promise FastTrak instead of onboard IDE), all seems to be fine on my end.

During my research for what was causing these problems, I found a white paper on AMD's site that clearly states an issue

Heavy PCI/AGP Bus Traffic Can Affect PCI/AGP Ordering

and that affect both actual chipset revision (B0 and B1), a fix is planned for a future silicon revision.

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/24089.pdf

According to AMD, this problem never showed up in real world, but only with their internal system analysis tools, but my guess would be, they never had a Parhelia in house ...

Anyways, it seems all problems disappeared after my last install and hence I can live with a bug that doesn't affect my system anymore.

Feel free to ask for assistance, in case you experience any probs with MPX chipset revision B1.
Although I temporarily had an Asus A7M266-D, which uses the rev B0 chipset, I cannot really help you out on that one, because it caused some very odd, not reproduceable lockups and hence I returned it in favor of the Tiger MPX.

[VJ]

Any thoughts on why the onboard LAN should be disabled ? And similarly why the BM-drivers should not be installed ?
The pci64/66 I'd put in my system, is a SCSI-controller (most likely an Adaptec 29160); onboard IDE would be required for a dvd-rom drive (but only that)

Thanks!


Jörg

[Maggi]

Originally posted by VJ
Any thoughts on why the onboard LAN should be disabled ? And similarly why the BM-drivers should not be installed ?

not really, but since I was having severe problems with both being used and I'm using a Gbit NIC and a Promise FastTrak, I had no real need for both and hence I decided not to install 'em.

This does not neccessarily mean, that my problems were caused by those two items, but my probs never showed up without those.

[VJ]

Thanks!

The pdf file you posted is dated April 2002. If they make mention of a planned future silicon revision, when might we expect to see the first of those reaching us ?
(AGP cards do apparently work in PCI-mode, sometimes they cause problems in AGP mode)

Jörg

[Tapeworm]

These symptoms sound very similar to the Intel 860/dual Xeon problems, and the speculation by one of the Intel techs that it was probably not the chipset, but compatibility with the AGP.

In that situation, the only board that I heard worked was the Super Micro P4DCE+. Not completely relevant, but surprisingly similar issues.