Tiger MP last call
the MPX chipset seems to offer more pci bandwidth, in addition to the 64bit being a full 66mhz now, with the caveat that the pci bus uses the 64bit channel for itself so if you use a 33mhz card it will reduce the throughput and limit the pci bus as well as the 64bit slots. But yes, the Asus looks like a great board, especially since they're the only one so far to announce proper on-die thermal support.
The only problem is that I need to get a new PC *now*. I can't wait for 2-3 revs of the Asus board :/
So overpriced stability from Intel i do believe it is...
The only problem is that I need to get a new PC *now*. I can't wait for 2-3 revs of the Asus board :/
So overpriced stability from Intel i do believe it is...
I have a tiger MP and have no porblems with pci bandwidth (11 masterverbs@max dsp), however XP or 2000 only offer 8 16bit wave IO and thats not enough for me. The main problem with the tiger is that under XP you get alot of copy protection errors (from pulsar). I did have it installed under acpi mode and I think that if you change it to standardpc mps mode (is this right sub?) that you get less of these. So if you use asio, and don't mind saving before you add a device to your project then the tiger is ready (do make sure that you get the newest version). For me I have one 1600 mp (running ME) and its pretty damn fast as it is and I know that I can add the other when it creamware gets XP worked out all the way. As for the upcoming MPX boards it looks like they are 4-6 months away (the last news I saw was about 2 weeks ago) and often that ends up being longer so I wouldn't hold my breath. Anyway I'm not saying to get the tiger just that if your other choice is a single proc athlon you might as well go for the better upgrade path. Also the Athlon's FPU is slammin! I haven't done anything on P4's but without SSE2 they are less powerful than p3's (on benchmarks at least) which are pale in comparison to the Athlon MP/XP's. Anyway thats my $.02 BTW sub did you ever get anymore testing done with your tiger or is it still just using a luna? Also if the MPX boards do come out sooner and someone gets one they should post on here just to let us all know. later
Ryan
Ryan
<a href=http://www.gamepc.com/reviews/hardware_ ... =&tp=>ASUS A7M266-D</a> is shipping <i>now</i>. 
Yeah it appears he's only running 1 cpu. I wouldn't hold my breath on creamware supporting SMP anytime soon, although it would make life much easier.
As for the Asus MPX board, I think I'll pass on the the first rev's of any board thanks ;]
Although Tyan certainly put the northbridge through the wringer, the new southbridge for the MPX already has been shown to have a bad usb implementation which means that the Asus mobo is shipping with a USB 2.0 card.
Great, except this leaves only 2 32bit/33mhz pci slots left. Lest you think this isn't a big deal due to the 64bit slots, the whole north/south connection actually uses the 64bit pci bus, so using a non-66mhz board in the 64bit slots would effectively reduce the north/south connection to 266mb/sec from the 533 (or whatever it currently is.) Not only will overall north/south speeds drop, but that fresh 266mb/sec that AMD has added to the 32bit pci bandwidth now contends with all the other data flowing on the N/S bus.
Weee!
It's going to cost me a fair penny, but I think i'm going to get a Supermicro with or without scsi, and not only take advantage of the two totally separate pci busses, but also give the new 1.8 Prestonia's a shot and see how Jackson technology stacks up after all (the 2.0's are like $200 more a piece.)
Another factor, btw, that has made me opt for a $600 more expensive option, is the fact that I tend to leave my pc running 24/7/365 and I really don't want to come home to a fried mobo on top of a melted chip. Oh, and I've already chipped one AMD cpu at work when I accidentally hit the heatsink when I was replacing one of our Videonet boards and got distracted. Oops ;]
As for the Asus MPX board, I think I'll pass on the the first rev's of any board thanks ;]
Although Tyan certainly put the northbridge through the wringer, the new southbridge for the MPX already has been shown to have a bad usb implementation which means that the Asus mobo is shipping with a USB 2.0 card.
Great, except this leaves only 2 32bit/33mhz pci slots left. Lest you think this isn't a big deal due to the 64bit slots, the whole north/south connection actually uses the 64bit pci bus, so using a non-66mhz board in the 64bit slots would effectively reduce the north/south connection to 266mb/sec from the 533 (or whatever it currently is.) Not only will overall north/south speeds drop, but that fresh 266mb/sec that AMD has added to the 32bit pci bandwidth now contends with all the other data flowing on the N/S bus.
Weee!
It's going to cost me a fair penny, but I think i'm going to get a Supermicro with or without scsi, and not only take advantage of the two totally separate pci busses, but also give the new 1.8 Prestonia's a shot and see how Jackson technology stacks up after all (the 2.0's are like $200 more a piece.)
Another factor, btw, that has made me opt for a $600 more expensive option, is the fact that I tend to leave my pc running 24/7/365 and I really don't want to come home to a fried mobo on top of a melted chip. Oh, and I've already chipped one AMD cpu at work when I accidentally hit the heatsink when I was replacing one of our Videonet boards and got distracted. Oops ;]
Good summing up of the situation Valis. That speed backoff is a big problem with the chipset. It makes those slots unusable if you don't have any 66Mhz cards. And those are not frequent. Maybe a 64/66 pulsar4??
BTW, does anybody has any idea why the pci takes such a dive when going from 1 to 2 cpu's? And is it the pci or is it the memory? I read the system/bios guide of the 762, but there seems to be no special settings for 2cpu concerning the pci. Most is for the memory. I'm begining to think the system becomes memory limited with 2cpu's.
BTW, does anybody has any idea why the pci takes such a dive when going from 1 to 2 cpu's? And is it the pci or is it the memory? I read the system/bios guide of the 762, but there seems to be no special settings for 2cpu concerning the pci. Most is for the memory. I'm begining to think the system becomes memory limited with 2cpu's.
Havoc,
I know you don't believe me, but I had your <i>exact same problem</i> with our Tyan TigerMP V1.01 board with PCI problems. <b>It is the board.</b> We tried everything, Win2kSP2 MPS/ACPI, WinXP MPS/ACPI, etc etc, nothing would work.
Then we got our Tyan TigerMP rev1.03. It worked perfect the first time, WinXP/ACPI. We can load 4 masterVerbs on a Luna2 card. The machine has been Ghosted, so now maybe this evening we'll toss in more DSP cards and see how far it goes, but, once again, I really honestly and totally think it is your motherboard revision.
BTW ASUS generally doesn't need or make rev2 boards. And USB1.1 always sucked anyway so I don't see that as a big deal, or a loss.
Also when you plug in a 33mhz card into a 66mhz slot, all the slots will run at 33mhz so you can treat them all as 'normal' slots, so again, no need for a Pulsar3/4 that runs at these speeds to slap em in there.
I might get a chance to build a machine on the A7M266-D in the coming weeks; when I do I will report here, of course!
I know you don't believe me, but I had your <i>exact same problem</i> with our Tyan TigerMP V1.01 board with PCI problems. <b>It is the board.</b> We tried everything, Win2kSP2 MPS/ACPI, WinXP MPS/ACPI, etc etc, nothing would work.
Then we got our Tyan TigerMP rev1.03. It worked perfect the first time, WinXP/ACPI. We can load 4 masterVerbs on a Luna2 card. The machine has been Ghosted, so now maybe this evening we'll toss in more DSP cards and see how far it goes, but, once again, I really honestly and totally think it is your motherboard revision.
BTW ASUS generally doesn't need or make rev2 boards. And USB1.1 always sucked anyway so I don't see that as a big deal, or a loss.
Also when you plug in a 33mhz card into a 66mhz slot, all the slots will run at 33mhz so you can treat them all as 'normal' slots, so again, no need for a Pulsar3/4 that runs at these speeds to slap em in there.
I might get a chance to build a machine on the A7M266-D in the coming weeks; when I do I will report here, of course!
From http://www.acmemicro.com :
======================================
INTEL XEON (FOSTER) 1.7GHz, OEM $280.00 $560.00
Super Micro P4DCE+ DUAL Xeon $419.00 $419.00
256MB Rambus Memory, PC800, Non-ECC $96.00 $192.00
------------------------
Sub Total: $1171.00
AMD Athlon MP 1800+ $299.00 $598.00
Tyan S2460 dual AMD K7 $193.00 $193.00
256MB DDR PC2100 ECC Reg. $112.00 $224.00
-----------------------
Sub Total: $1015.00
=======================================
Since the prices of DDR RAM have risen dramatically since October--and the need for registered DDR in most of the dual AMD mobos, unless you want to replace your unregistered sticks when upgrading of course--there's only $156 price difference between the 2 configurations. With the Intel board there is SSE2 support (which will be important for Logic 5 users in 2 weeks), an ethernet port AND the 64bit data channel not only runs at 66Mhz rather than 33Mhz. Plus the 64bit channel is actually connected to the northbridge leaving the 32bit pci bus on it's own data channel. This chart is really only for cost comparison however, as I'm going off the beaten path a bit more...
First, I'm going to plop down for onboard scsi on the Supermicro P4DC6+ as it's only $200 more and I already have 2 u160 10000rpm drives that I used to bootstrap my ancient Supermicro P6DLS. Also, I'm going to join in on an experiment and get a pair of the new 1.8 Xeons with the Prestonia core and see what impact SMT has on my audio. Should that not work out well I'm sure I can find a willing candidate for a trade over at 2cpu.com and step back to the old Foster Xeon core and still have a rock solid machine with 2 separate pci busses that I won't have to worry about leaving on in my studio 24/7/365 as I've been prone to do with my machines for the last 7 or 8 years.
In any case, this isn't so much a flame as one last sigh before I run out and spend what money I have left in my checkbook after the holiday season. Believe me, I'd love to run with AMD and leer at all the snooty Intel users from beneath my smug expression of satisfaction from not falling for marketing hoopla, but even with the MPX AMD still seems to be lacking a few things that I feel are important.
As a final thought did I happen to mention that I've had 3 cpu fans fail in the last 2 years on my current machine? Not a single time was I home carefully monitoring my cpu temp. And yet still Asus has the only board to have proper on-die protection for the MPX chipset...
======================================
INTEL XEON (FOSTER) 1.7GHz, OEM $280.00 $560.00
Super Micro P4DCE+ DUAL Xeon $419.00 $419.00
256MB Rambus Memory, PC800, Non-ECC $96.00 $192.00
------------------------
Sub Total: $1171.00
AMD Athlon MP 1800+ $299.00 $598.00
Tyan S2460 dual AMD K7 $193.00 $193.00
256MB DDR PC2100 ECC Reg. $112.00 $224.00
-----------------------
Sub Total: $1015.00
=======================================
Since the prices of DDR RAM have risen dramatically since October--and the need for registered DDR in most of the dual AMD mobos, unless you want to replace your unregistered sticks when upgrading of course--there's only $156 price difference between the 2 configurations. With the Intel board there is SSE2 support (which will be important for Logic 5 users in 2 weeks), an ethernet port AND the 64bit data channel not only runs at 66Mhz rather than 33Mhz. Plus the 64bit channel is actually connected to the northbridge leaving the 32bit pci bus on it's own data channel. This chart is really only for cost comparison however, as I'm going off the beaten path a bit more...
First, I'm going to plop down for onboard scsi on the Supermicro P4DC6+ as it's only $200 more and I already have 2 u160 10000rpm drives that I used to bootstrap my ancient Supermicro P6DLS. Also, I'm going to join in on an experiment and get a pair of the new 1.8 Xeons with the Prestonia core and see what impact SMT has on my audio. Should that not work out well I'm sure I can find a willing candidate for a trade over at 2cpu.com and step back to the old Foster Xeon core and still have a rock solid machine with 2 separate pci busses that I won't have to worry about leaving on in my studio 24/7/365 as I've been prone to do with my machines for the last 7 or 8 years.
In any case, this isn't so much a flame as one last sigh before I run out and spend what money I have left in my checkbook after the holiday season. Believe me, I'd love to run with AMD and leer at all the snooty Intel users from beneath my smug expression of satisfaction from not falling for marketing hoopla, but even with the MPX AMD still seems to be lacking a few things that I feel are important.
As a final thought did I happen to mention that I've had 3 cpu fans fail in the last 2 years on my current machine? Not a single time was I home carefully monitoring my cpu temp. And yet still Asus has the only board to have proper on-die protection for the MPX chipset...
Right, which is exactly what made me finally decide to get in on the action--the 1.8 Prestonia's (that's the 512k cache btw) are like $200 cheaper than the 2.0's tho so I think I'll get in on the ground floor and swap up in a year to 2.4Ghz or whatever the socket 603 tops out at. The neatest thing about Prestonia isn't the 512k Cache tho, it's the dual cores ;]
http://www.whiningdog.net/reviews/PC/Of ... sPart1.htm
The problem is there's always something better just around the corner...later this year P4 gets 533Mhz fsb (133 quad), and the Xeon follows suit and gets a format change to socket 604 with dual channel DDR, but I simply cannot wait any longer.
I held out for 3 months for MP to be stable and then thought mebbe MPX was the answer, now there's know usb 1.1 (uck anyway) issues AND the one board (asus) that has thermal protection with proper on-die support & shutdown seems to be having problems with using ANY 32bit cards in the 64bit slots (3.3v *should* work as they're properly keyed, it just drops the speed of the 64bit slots back to 32/33).
http://forums.2cpu.com/showthread.php?s ... genumber=2
So in any case, I may spend $1k more than I like but at least I'll get work done rather than sitting around for months beta-testing chipsets and BIOSs.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: valis on 2002-01-08 14:30 ]</font>
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: valis on 2002-01-08 14:33 ]</font>
http://www.whiningdog.net/reviews/PC/Of ... sPart1.htm
The problem is there's always something better just around the corner...later this year P4 gets 533Mhz fsb (133 quad), and the Xeon follows suit and gets a format change to socket 604 with dual channel DDR, but I simply cannot wait any longer.
I held out for 3 months for MP to be stable and then thought mebbe MPX was the answer, now there's know usb 1.1 (uck anyway) issues AND the one board (asus) that has thermal protection with proper on-die support & shutdown seems to be having problems with using ANY 32bit cards in the 64bit slots (3.3v *should* work as they're properly keyed, it just drops the speed of the 64bit slots back to 32/33).
http://forums.2cpu.com/showthread.php?s ... genumber=2
So in any case, I may spend $1k more than I like but at least I'll get work done rather than sitting around for months beta-testing chipsets and BIOSs.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: valis on 2002-01-08 14:30 ]</font>
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: valis on 2002-01-08 14:33 ]</font>
I typed a post, but apparently it got lost. Probably stuck in a router somewhere. Or never hit the send button.
Valis, let know how you turn out with the prestonias. That they will be ancient by the time you have them in your hands is the way technology goes Problem is there are no shops around here that have them on their list, so I cannot compare your prices.
Valis, let know how you turn out with the prestonias. That they will be ancient by the time you have them in your hands is the way technology goes
Problem is there are no shops around here that have them on their list, so I cannot compare your prices.Any case that will fit a Tiger MP should (I think) fit the Supermicro Xeon boards. At least the Lian Li, Antec and Chenbro should work (not to mention the Supermicro/Addtronics cases).
It's the Tyan and Iwill boards that need a special case:
http://forums.2cpu.com/showthread.php?s ... light=xeon
In any case, I'm personally trying to decide whether I have the budget to go Lian Li + Enermax or Antec PS, or just stick with a Supermicro full tower with 400W. Hopefully I can go higher wattage so that I'm prepared to add tons of creamware cards in the enventuality that my Pulsar runs without a hitch ;]
It's the Tyan and Iwill boards that need a special case:
http://forums.2cpu.com/showthread.php?s ... light=xeon
In any case, I'm personally trying to decide whether I have the budget to go Lian Li + Enermax or Antec PS, or just stick with a Supermicro full tower with 400W. Hopefully I can go higher wattage so that I'm prepared to add tons of creamware cards in the enventuality that my Pulsar runs without a hitch ;]
<a href=http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewtopic ... &63>Posted a summary of dual testing in this thread here.</a>
i thought intel would let the northwood start at 2000 mhz... but now i have seen on intel´s page a table with an 1,6 A ghz p4 next to an ordinary 1,6 ghz... and a 1,7 A ghz, and 1,8... 
so is this right? are there also smaller northwoods now?
have fun!
so is this right? are there also smaller northwoods now?have fun!
<font face="courier"><i>native wishes...</i></font><br><font face="verdana" color="orange">da <font size="+1">peppi connection!</font> <b><i>music</i> and <i>video</i></b> feeds at <font size="+1"><a href="http://www.peppisworld.de">www.peppisworld.de</a>
The PentiumII series, the first models were intentionally 'underclocked' not to boost speed progression too much. These were the days of overclockers paradise. Later, Intel tried to lock CPU multipliers on cpu's to prevent this OC'ing. Lots of dealers seemed to sell OC'ed pc's as standard fast pc's.
Or maybe that was just a dream?
Or maybe that was just a dream?