Tyan K8WE (S2895) & Opteron 270 versus 290 with games

On May 13, 1:14 pm, BC <b....TakeThisOut@bc.com> wrote:
> Dear Jim,
>
> here are some socket 940 CPUs compared:
>
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Productcompare.aspx?Submit=Property&N=2...
>
> 270, 280, and 290:
>
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Productcompare.aspx?Submit=Property&N=2...

Dear BC,

Thanks! It appears that the *only* difference in the chips, other
than the increase in clock speed, is the increase in the L1 cache from
64K to 128K. That doesn't sound like a huge change to me.

> 209 is $719.00: if you need two of them, that's a hefty chunk of
> change. 2.0 to 2.8: definitely faster, but, as you said, for gaming,
> it depends on where your bottleneck is, and games will not necessarily
> going to be faster--I think you have ECC RAM, so that slows things down
> a bit for games, unless I am mistaken....

I think you're right about the memory. ECC PC2700 memory is
*extremely* slow by today's standards. It was slow even by the
standards when I built the machine. I mostly built it (a) to try a
dual-processor motherboard and (b) to have a 133 MHz PCI-X slot for
the SATA RAID card. SATA 2 came out just as I build the machine, so I
have an SATA 2 RAID card running at 133 MHz. I think my error was
that it was just too damn expensive to build in the first place. The
operating system is what fooled me. I could buy a 64-bit operating
system, Windows Professional x64, for only $100.00 from New Egg at the
time, which supported dual processors. Now, however, I am screwed.
The Vista upgrade would be to Ultimate to keep the dual processors and
all the other gaming features. (None of the consumer versions of
Vista support dual processors.)

> Apparently Barcelona (quad core) is going to be very good--though there
> is no objective evidence of that just yet, only rumors....

The motherboards would probably be quite a bit better then as well.
I've been noticing that the new boards have all sorts of heat pipes
and advanced feature sets that the K8WE didn't have. It was a really
nice board, particularly the on-board SCSI, but some of the newer
boards are even nicer.

> You could wait for a Barcelona with a new single CPU motherboard,
> recycle your 8800GTX into the new system....I think I would wait and
> see, as prices on the socket 940 CPUs have not dropped like they have
> for AM2 and Intel's 775.....

That sounds like a good idea. I do like these server motherboards,
for the SCSI and 64-bit slots, but they really aren't built for
performance. I sort of build a machine which was a bridge to
nowhere. <g>

Thanks for your advice!

Jim
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