Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 06:32:35 09/03/01
Hello,
Because i joined with a dual AMD at the world champs, this
question has reached me a zillion of times now. Time to post something
about it instead of repeating like a schoolteacher what i did.
For those who are fascinated by building the fastest dual, but
already smell the big trouble, here are what my impression is.
First of all there are NOT many mainboards which allow a dual AMD.
Especially when a few months ago VIA announced that they would stop
making a cheap dual chipset for the AMD, it was clear that it would
take quite long before other brands than Tyan would produce a dual
AMD motherboard.
There are big rumours still that several motherboard manufacturers
have made one, but honesty let's me also tell you that when they have
such plans, that it's unlikely that within a year they get on the
market.
The tyan motherboard they spoke for over a year about, then when
it was released, it took another 4 months to get in the shops.
Cheap alternatives to it will most likely face the same problems.
When i started building my own dual AMD machine, it very quickly
appeared WHY so little manufacturers are in a row to build their own
dual AMD motherboard
a) AMDs support is near zero
b) no manufacturer will be able to produce a cheap motherboard,
dual AMD motherboards will be pretty expensive for the time being.
So for those who want to build a 'cheap' dual AMD machine, this is the
end of the dream. A dual AMD machine will be very expensive. If you
see which components i need you already will get horrified directly.
As my only experience is with a tyan S2462SCSI motherboard, i will
further continue talk about this.
First of all when i started ordering parts for my computer, this
was months before the world champs, but nearly all computershops here
laughed at me: "Sir, what you want to build we can deliver as easily
as a scramjet fighter!"
Very soon it appeared to me that AMD is only giving support (if they
ever in their life give support anyway; to me it seems the AMD
support helpdesk is non-existing) if you put very expensive palomino
processors inside. Note those processors are sold as the K7 Athlon MP
processor. Don't forget the 'mp' as that is what it is all about.
First of all those processors you recognize very easily as the
processor core is square (4mm x 4mm or something) versus the tbird
and other athlon cpus are rectangular (6mm x 4mm or something), so no
shop can ever dick you here. See the AMD homepage on details ( www.amd.com ).
Another crucial component is the mainboard. A few months ago there
was only the
Tyan Thunder K7 S2462 mainboard, in 3 different versions.
Most important difference being a SCSI version and non-scsi version.
Nowadays there is also a Tyan Tiger S2460 mainboard, which is quite similar
to the Tyan thunder, but later more onto that.
As i already ordered things months ahead of the world champs, i was in
no hurry to get the simple things like, diskdrive and such. That would
proof to be a very stupid and costly mistake!
First i managed to buy a motherboard somewhere. Now this s2462scsi motherboard
which i bought is a SERVER motherboard. So something that doesn't fit
into a miditower, not even a big tower.
It's very heavy, at least a kilo heavier than any other motherboard i
ever had in my hands.
I've build quite some (especially Novell) servers in my life, but this
motherboard really is the most demanding motherboard i have ever seen.
First of all a major problem from all processors above 1Ghz, they
all share that they have a HUGE power consumption.
AMD proudly presents an overview where they say the Palomino is 20% less
power consuming than a similar tbird.
Well that's nice, but that tbird is simply WASTING energy. Let's
compare the 0.5 watts 200Mhz RISC processors which are used bigtime
nowadays in many products, with the 75 watts which a K7 at 1.2 Ghz eats!
Note that also nowadays faster IDE harddisks, smartly renamed to U-ATA100,
are having huge heat problems, not to mention that this is a result of
a huge power consumption.
Imagine a chessprogram getting in the endgame into its endgame tablebases.
No matter what type of EGTBs you use, 2 x 75 watts for the processor,
something even bigger for the harddisk, the mainboard needing a lot.
And another 4 fans or something needing huge power consumption too.
Not to mention if you also need to read something from a diskdrive, DVD
rom, or when busy burning a cdrom.
Obvoiusly also using quite some power is when you put an additional
Geforce card inside the computer.
In short, the special power supply that is required by this mainboard
is no luxury. Note that the power supply is a big disaster to get.
Only a very special power supply is what you need, the 2 different power
supplies in this world that work for the S2462 are listed on the Tyan
homepage. If i remember well, one of them gets made in Austria, the
other somewhere in Japan.
Both need huge time to get delivered and they both deliver to the mainboard
around 460 watts, which is not a Watt too much.
Getting the power supply problems i had were probably also experienced by
others, which probably has led to a new mainboard called the Tyan Tiger S2460
which is quite copy from the S2462, but it can use a normal 20 pins ATX
power supply, whereas the S2462 needs a special 24 pins E-ATX and an additional
extra 8 pins power (so a P4 power supply isn't enough either as that's
only 300 watts and doesn't have the extra 8 pins power).
This 460 watts special power supply, whichever brand, just like the mainboard
of course do not fit in a small case;
the mainboard is 2 inches bigger than a normal mainboard and the DDR ram
is going to touch the 3.5 diskdrive bayes in a normal bigtower, as
well as that the power supply doesn't fit in most bigtowers.
I ordered myself an ADDTRONICS 7890A case to put the stuff in. Very smartly
i also ordered wheels for it, which of course makes the thing 10 centimeters
higher (and therefore as high as a table), but i definitely didn't regret it.
Now i was quite stupid, only when i received the mainboard i figured out
that i needed this special power supply which was recommended by Tyan
(they should note that it is NOT a normal ATX power supply on their homepage!)
because i already had ordered a very nice 550 watts ATX power supply (also
for usage with P4), which has 2 fans and is blowing in less air when
the case is not so hot, so very silent because of this.
If someone wants to buy this thing from me, as this thing is perfect
to use for the Tyan Tiger S2460 mainboard, i will do something off from
the price i bought it for!
Anyway that was already the first part i bought extra which was
unnecessary. Next mistake i made with the processor cooling,
but before that i need to talk about the other components.
Of course i also ordered a UATA100 harddisk (40 gb IBM deskstar),
from several sources i had already heart the rumour that the Maxtor
diskdrives were not smart to use in combination with egtbs, as they
get very hot.
Now i want to generalize that; if you do a lot of random reads at the
harddisk (like with egtbs), do NOT get a U-ATA 100 harddisk without
extra cooling of it. Get a SCSI harddisk. That's 40 times faster than
a U-ATA 100 harddisk anyway for EGTBs, of course you pay for that
more. A scsi has its own processor inside, that's what makes the
price so expensive for it, apart that the thing is simply faster and
better cooled and made to get used a lot.
I expect in the coming years loads of U-ATA100 harddisks to get broken
because of heat, as not a single one gets delivered with extra cooling AFAIK.
Note that the fastest SCSI harddisks are U160 scsi. The Thunder K7
S2462 has this usually onboard (scsi version). The cheaper Tiger
S2460 mainboard does NOT have this onboard.
The tiger S2460 mainboard is a lot SMALLER than the S2462 too, so
bigtowers where there are not 3.5 bays preventing the memory from getting
put into the memory banks, you can put this thing in too.
Note tiger doesn't have scsi and requires most likely ECC memory. ECC
memory is slower than normal memory as there is an extra clock needed
to check whether the memory was correct. ECC memory is used for servers
usually where errors must be prevented at all costs.
The S2462 doesn't require ECC, but requires REGISTERED memory. Now usually
ECC DDR ram also is registered and vice versa, but you can't just buy
ecc DDR ram and be sure that it's also registered.
The S2462 does NOT require ecc checking from the memory, keep that in mind.
That's faster than using ecc checking. I would be pretty amazed if you can
turn off ECC checking in the tiger S2460.
I don't need to mention that there is not so much registered DDR ram
in this world. Most manufacturers make it like turtles move on, slow.
No computershop can be expected to have this in stock, and his importer
most likely doesn't have registered DDR ram in stock either.
It takes WEEKS to get as in my case it had to be ordered from the USA.
Finally i had all the parts 1 day before i wanted to leave to maastricht.
The second dissappointment was when i tried to assemble the machine,
that the processor coolers didn't fit onto the mainboard, i had ordered
very expensive coolers with Copper+Aluminium heatsink and huge fans
for them with thermal paste.
That didn't fit onto the mainboard! Because there are 2 sockets onto
the mainboard, there is obviously less space for the coolers!
All what fits on the mainboard are standard socket A coolers.
So 5 minutes before closing time i went to a computershop at
friday evening, and got myself 2 standard coolers. Note that those
do not cool as well as needed, for tbirds it's definitely NOT
enough.
I of course directly flashed the bios from the tyan. Note the flashing
util from Tyan is even less compatible with OSes than Rebel from Ed
Schroeder is. Where Rebel only works under win98,winME, the utility
to flash the bios from Tyan ONLY works under win98, not even winME.
What you need is to boot with win98 floppy, then flash the bios with
the latest version (i have flashed 2.07A), but you need at least 2.06
otherwise your machine is doomed to crash and some important features
like power savings and measuring temperature from the hardware doesn't
work.
Now you're ready, and can test things. First of all the big surprise
was that Michel Langeveld claimed he had Tbirds inside. I do not know
whether this is true, because the tests with the dual tbirds
were very bad. No one so far offered me 2 tbirds to test either, so
i can't say it's not true either.
If crafty had dual tbirds 1.4Ghz, then the latest stepping tbirds
work great (and for a real small price compared to Athlon MPs),
because when i tested diep onto that machine it was slightly, but
definitely, faster than my own 1.2Ghz dual athlon MP!
A big surprise! Of course AMD nor Tyan gives any support upon
running tbirds dual, so that might be a big bummer for some of you.
It means in short that there are known bugs in running tbirds dual,
but that most of the time in non-critical computer systems, this is
not a big problem.
When DIEP runs at 2 processors for quite a while, then the freak
program: 08/28/01 07:53p 1,543,894 MBM509.EXE
This is the only program that can show in windows what temperature the
processors have. It wasn't easy to configure, but considering that
with default socket-A coolers the temperature is between 61-65 degrees
celcius for each processor, and between 57-60 for the motherboard,
it's obvious that cooling this munster is not easy.
The biggest problem and only problem which i have for the machine
is not only finding a place for it in my office (already have 2 other
bigtowers there) but the huge noise this cooling makes.
The dual AMD S2462 produces (because you can only use a specified
power supply) a huge amount of noise. It's comparable with a 1 meter high
vaccum cleaner.
The noise is definitely in the same league. I have my machine in the
first floor and only because my neighbours are deaf they do not hear it,
but even if i walk downstairs i still hear the machine!
Obviously i cannot sleep when the machine is turned on, no one can in
this house and it definitely isn't a small house!
What i'm going to do with this machine is put it either in the Attic
or in the basement.
I approach the machine then by using either Citrix which is build in into
win2000 server, or i put linux onto it and approach it remote.
This machine is definitely not a machine to buy for home usage. Whereas
my dual P3-800Mhz supermicro was called 'server' because of the expensive
mainboard + processors, this dual AMD is definitely not only more expensive
than a dual P3, most important is that its sheer size and huge noise
level make me call it a server!
For those for who the noise might be a huge problem, go for the tyan tiger
dual AMD S2460, but keep in mind that this thing has no SCSI onboard,
which for the price you pay is definitely a need.
A short note for those who turn now to intel. A dual P3 is cheap but
of course way slower than the DDR ram with which a dual AMD is equipped.
A dual P4 on the other hand is not only way SLOWER than a dual AMD,
it's definitely also more EXPENSIVE. Note that also a P4 needs a different
power supply just like the dual AMDs, and for the same reason.
In short my advice would be to only buy a dual AMD if
a) you need a fast business server which is going to do heavy
calculations, because AMD processors are fastest for floating point
in the PC market, and even faster than that for integer calculation
b) you don't mind the noise and have the money to spend on it.
c) you don't mind the bad helpdesk from Tyan + AMD, intel is definitely
answerring helpdesk email sometimes!
In short i concluded this machine to be faster than a quad xeon 700
when the quad runs linux (huge speed loss because of compiler).
Considering its price then, it's a very good buy, because quads and
8 processor machines are really unaffordable, not to mention their size
and weight and power consumption!
Now all i need is some extra cooling, more than 60 degrees celcius is really
too much :)
Best regards,
Vincent
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