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

[seth vidal]

On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 01:21, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-10-15 at 23:31, seth vidal wrote:
> > After having suffered through 50 or so tyan 2460s and 2466 dual athlon
> > motherboards I personally hope to never see another tyan motherboard.
> > never a larger steaming pile of crap have I seen.
> 
> I'm running on the Tyan 2460 Tiger MP right here.  Been solid under
> Linux.  XP Pro is a different story (BIOS issues it seems).  I've heard
> of a few people with power-related issues, but I've got an Antec 550W
> True Power and 0 such issues.
> 

read up on the tyan 2460  sometime - the number of 'issues' that tyan
acknowledged after the fact is enormous. There appears to be only 2-3
total configurations of nic/ps/memory/processors/fans that work AT ALL,
not to mention type of load.

We ran over 50 of these things in a beowulf cluster and they were an
absolute nightmare.
They were so far from production ready it was painful.


> The Tyan 2466 Tiger MPX is supposed to be even more stable.  The
> redesign of the power was supposed to help.

it's better, true -but it isn't great. The bios 'upgrades' were a mess
from 4.01 until 4.04 which was a period of about 8 months.
every new letter release (4.01q etc) brought a new level of joy at
finding what thing had been broken and what things partially fixed (ie,
oh look - pxe now works, sorta, for the onboard card, but oh - they
won't boot w/o a keyboard in, even with ignore-keyboard-errors on.)


> But if you really wanted stability, you should have gone with a Tyan
> Thunder product.

We evaluated them - getting the tyan thunders inside a rackmount case is
nontrivial - and the additional cost for 'server features' really made
little sense for a beowulf node.

-sv