Which chipset for a opteron 2-way SMP system?

[G. Hugh Song]

By now, it appears there are three chipset choices.
AMD reference, Nvidia 3Pro, and VIA.
Is there a clear winner among the three?

Thanks.

Hugh

[Tony Hill]

On Fri, 15 Aug 2003 04:33:04 GMT, Hugh <ghsong@nospam.com> wrote:By now, it appears there are three chipset choices.AMD reference, Nvidia 3Pro, and VIA.Is there a clear winner among the three?

Well, right now there are no Opteron boards out there using the nVidia
chipset, and only one using the VIA chipset, so that really narrows
the choice. What's more, the one dual-processor motherboard using
VIA's Opteron chipset has some fairly bad design issues IMO, ie it can
only the memory controllers on one of the two processors.

If you ask me, Tyan's Thunder K8W motherboard is the nicest of all the
Opteron boards I've seen. It's the first Opteron board I've seen that
supports both AGP and PCI-X (this is slightly tricky to do with AMD's
chipset and PCI-X is not supported by VIA or nVidia's chipset, which
is why most Opteron boards have only AGP or PCI-X, but not both) and
it can use memory connected to both processors. It also has serial
ATA and gigabit ethernet built-in.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca