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Old August 20th 04, 11:50 AM
Tim
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Hi,

2CPU has a link to this review covering the new nocona 800MHz offering.

http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews...dXJsX3BhZ2U9MQ

- Tim


"Paul" wrote in message
...
In article s.com, "Tony
Gilchrist" wrote:

Hi;

I am building / upgrading a 2-proc. box, and I need some advice. I like
the
asus line, and want to use it, but am not clear on which mobo I would be
best off with. I need two processors, and it should be reasonably fast,
but
that's the only major criteria. I will use a seperate scsi card, so
don't
want the onboard scsi (or onboard anything extra, really). The system
will
be used for 3D animation and graphics dev.

There seem to beseveral choices: (PCH-DL, PCH-DLW, PU-DL, maybe others?)

http://usa.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=PCH-DL&langs=09

http://usa.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=PU-DL&langs=09

http://usa.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=PP-DLW&langs=09

I am wading through the specs, but if anyone has advice or suggestions,
they
would be welcome.

Thx!


Take a look on forums.2cpu.com .

There is mention of Xeon processors with FSB800. These could
possibly give more memory bandwidth. The two boards mentioned
are very recent (bleeding edge :-) so buying these would make
you an early adopter. (The PC-DL Leythos suggested, is a
mature product, so less likely to create problems for you.
Whether you would be interested in these, depends on how soon
you need it to work.)

http://forums.2cpu.com/showthread.php?threadid=54871
http://www.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/Sock...36_ncch-dl.pdf
http://www.asus.com.tw/pub/ASUS/mb/S...1737_nct-d.pdf

A quick glance at the manual, shows NCCH-DL is ATX form factor,
uses the same 875 Northbridge used by P4C800 boards, and uses
ordinary unbuffered PC3200 (with ECC or without ECC, your choice).
In a sense, it is like a P4C800 with two processors instead of one.
The Southbridge is different, and I don't know anything about its
track record. The NCCH-DL looks to be the successor to the PC-DL
that Leythos mentioned, only supports FSB800, whereas PC-DL
does FSB400 and FSB533 processors (officially). Note that although
you stuff 4x1GB modules in it, you get to use only 3.2 to 3.5GB of
the memory, due to the PCI/AGP needing some address space. And it
takes an AGP 8X graphics card, so you can use the board for
visualization as well as computing. (Play Doom3 on one processor,
while the other one is grinding out some work. :-)

The NCT-D appears to be ATX form factor too. It is 12 x 9.8 inches.
It can have up to 8 GB of registered ECC DDR2 memory (I wonder where
you buy that ?). I expect the NCCH-DL might have the better memory
bandwidth of the two, but you may have to wait for a review site
to bench it to be sure. The NCT-D has a slot for PCI Express x16,
for the successor to AGP video cards.

If you look at Asus web sites, you might notice that the motherboard
models listed, differ from site to site. Not all boards are sold
in all markets (like model numbers for microATX boards for example,
sometimes differ from one part of the world to another). This makes
it difficult to see stuff like the two boards mentioned above.

http://usa.asus.com/products/mb/mbindex.htm (6 boards listed)
http://www.asus.com.tw/products/mb/mbindex.htm (26 boards listed)

On the forums.2cpu.com, you may see some mention of Tyan boards
as well. Tyan has some dual and quad Opteron boards, which are
fun to look at, just for the sheer amount of stuff on the board.
Note that some boards take video cards, while other boards are
true server boards with ATI Rage XL build-in graphics only, which
wouldn't be very practical for visualization. (Useful benchmarks
comparing Xeon desktops to Opteron desktops are hard to find, so
I have no idea which is a better fit for you.)

http://www.tyan.com/l_chinese/products/html/matrix.html
(A Quad to drool over...)
http://www.tyan.com/l_chinese/produc...erk8qspro.html

Things to watch out for - finding a chassis to house your purchase,
finding the right power supply, with the connectors needed and
power rating, and the all important cooling solution for the
processor. I don't know if the FSB800 Xeons will need something
special for cooling or not (as they are 90nm, expect a bit of
extra heat). Failure to cool these properly, means they'll
run in thermal throttle mode all the time, and they won't
benchmark well as a result. Perhaps forums.2cpu.som will
have some suggestions.

The bottom of this page, lists the Xeons available for sale:
http://www.intel.com/intel/finance/pricelist/

Have fun,
Paul