Having to run a single Opteron on a dual board isn’t impossible and I'm just going to prove it in this short article. The test is conducted with the first AGP dual-Opteron motherboard that reached the marketplace a month: the Arima Riowork HDAMB.
The system configuration is like this:
Motherboard: "HDAMB-WO" (without S-ATA, Firewire, IDE-RAID, and USB2)
Note! USB2 connectors at the rear front are there but the USB2 chip VIA VT6202L in charge of it is missing on this board model.
CPU: 1 x Opteron 240
Memory: 2 x Kingston "KVR333X72RC25/512"*
(2 x 512MB DDR333 registered ECC )
*This memory is not yet listed in the support table of the motherboard's manual.
Hard disk: Samsung "SP1203N" (120GB, 7200RPM)
Power supply: Fortron "FSP460-60PFN" (460W)
Operating system: SuSE Linux 8.2 beta 9 for AMD64 (Opteron/Athlon 64)
AGP graphic card: Important to note that AGP Pro does not officialy support AGP x1 or x2
2 were used with different results :
ATI Radeon 7500: the system locked up at startup. No way to have it working properly. I can just pray for a BIOS upgrade that will fix this...
NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti200: no problem
PCI graphic card: They can be used in place of AGP card. For instance, an old S3 Virge was properly working.
Now let’s power on the system:
Although the Linux64 system is still a beta version it seems to run fast and stable and every hardware component seems to be supported (Sound, network,...). I have no benchmark results for my system but I found out that my system runs faster in dual channel mode (2 x 512MB) than in single channel mode (1 x 512MB). For example the second start up of "Open Office 1.02" takes 2:10/100 seconds in single channel mode. It takes 1:89/100 seconds in dual channel mode. (about 10% faster in dual channel mode).
That's all for now. This little report had no other ambition than to show that a single Opteron processor on a dual processor board can work fine without too much trouble. With the current configuration Linux rocks and I might write again once the second Opteron will be here...
More Opteron in real life
Opteron users-to-be need you!
You too share your encounter with Opteron processor, motherboards and softwares. We don't need shakespearean style writing. Just a picture or two, quick comments and we'll do the rest...
Inquire, suggest, comment or submit your Opteron real life experience here. Thanks!
|
