AMD Athlon64 Systems -- dual-940 boards with AGP+PCI-X are still costly ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Wed, 2003-10-15 at 22:35, Robert L Cochran wrote:
> Is anyone using the AMD Athlon64?

I was hoping I would once a "low-cost" dual-940 mainboard came out.

Heck, most dual-940 boards don't even have AGP.  Although I'm not a huge
fan of AGP (especially since PCI-X is more stable, and just as fast),
all the "commodity" video cards are AGP based (and virtually none are
PCI-X).

Only a few, select dual-940 mainboards have both AGP and PCI-X are
costly.  E.g., the Tyan S2885 "Thunder" K8W is almost $600.

I though the "holy grail" had arrived with the introduction of the Tyan
S2875 "Tiger" K8W.  Although I haven't seen any pricing yet, I think I
can forget about considerign it.  Why?  It's got 0 I/O capability. 
E.g., they don't come with the AMD-8131 PCI-X I/O Hub.  So _everything_
runs of the "meager" 32-bit, 33MHz PCI channel of the AMD-8111 --
_including_ the GbE, SATA, etc...

Ouch, talk about bus contention!!!

So I'm back where I started.  I might as well wait until the Opteron
comes down in price anyway, before investing in a dual-940.

Maybe someone else will come out with a cheaper HyperTransport
hub/bridge that has PCI-X and LPC on the same chip, instead of the
separate AMD 8131 and AMD 8111 "reference" solution, cutting costs. 
Heck, maybe they'll put it "all-in-one" anyway, including AGP too. 
They've done that for the single processor systems, especially the more
"consumer" 754 pin.  But not dual.

Or maybe "commodity" PCI-X video cards will start making an appearance. 
Ack, not likely given the marketing power of Intel.  Although I'm
waiting for ATI or, especially, nVidia (who has AMD-only chipsets) to
surprise me.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith, E.I.  mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org  http://thebs.org