Re: Building new Athlon AMD64 Socket 939 or 940 machine

From: Nate Eldredge (nge_at_cs.hmc.edu)
Date: 11/28/05

  • Next message: Bill Paul: "Re: bge driver autoneg failure and system-wide stalls" 
    Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 22:01:13 -0800 (PST)
To: Cian Hughes <cianlists@cian.ws>

    On Sun, 27 Nov 2005, Cian Hughes wrote:

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    > Hey, I'm in no rush on this one, but I'm planning on building a new Athlon
    > AMD64 machine, It's primarily as a voip server and file storage box for home
    > use and will have 8 SATA (possibly SATA-II) drives attached to a RAID 5 card,
    > probably Highpoint (but i'm open on this).
    >
    > I am wondering, what have people on this list built recently, within these
    > bounds, I'm looking to choose a motherboard with one or two 1000Base-T
    > Ethernet ports (to keep PCI's free for other things, ISDN card, TV Tuner,
    > etc...), if possible what has and hasn't worked, i'm not too worried about
    > onboard HD controllers, etc.
    >
    > Basically, before I buy I want to avoid any mistakes that people have already
    > hit, I know there is a supported hardware list, but is their an advised
    > hardware list for FreeBSD, especially with regard to RAID Cards and
    > Motherboards.

    Hi Cian,

    I put together a machine a couple months ago. I used a Tyan S2875ANRF
    ("Tiger K8W") dual-Opteron motherboard and a single Opteron 244 (1.8 GHz)
    cpu (second one may come in the future). I am running 5.4 and have been
    very happy with it.

    I decided it was worth going for Opteron over Athlon 64. They seem to
    have better performance (wider memory bus, etc), obviously SMP ability,
    and as I understand it the regular Athlon 64s don't support ECC memory
    which I insist upon. The Athlon 64FX appear to be similar to the fastest
    Opterons and differ mainly for price marketing purposes (sold to gamers).

    I had a disk-related panic/crash once, I cannot remember the details. It
    never recurred. The board has a SiI 3114 SATA controller, and I believe
    support for SiI is not perfect, so that may be the cause; or the
    dirt-cheap disk. If you are going to use your own controller then this
    probably has nothing to do with you. I don't know anything about RAID
    hardware, sorry.

    It has an onboard 1000BaseT port with em controller. This works
    perfectly, though I only use it at 100Mb since I don't have a gigabit
    switch.

    There are 5 pci slots and 1 agp. No vga on board. I threw in an old junk
    pci vga card because I only use it for text (no X on the box, it's mostly
    headless). It also has serial ports which could be useful for headless
    operation. Supposedly the BIOS setup also supports a serial console.

    Sound, USB and Firewire are on board. I have not tried them.

    It doesn't support dual-core opteron, if that's something you wanted.

    The only other thing that didn't work immediately is the cpu temperature
    sensor (Winbond W83627HF). There is a hardware bit you have to twiddle to
    enable it, which mbmon doesn't do. I wrote my own utility to read the
    sensor after reading the data***, which of course you are welcome to if
    you wind up with this board.

    So I would recommend this board/cpu based on my experience so far. It's a
    good value for the money.

    I hope this is of some value to you. Let me know if you want to know any
    more. 

    -- 
Nate Eldredge
nge@cs.hmc.edu
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