Current best recommendation for Athlon 64 motherboard?

[Bryan J. Smith]

Axel Thimm wrote:
> what are currently considered good high-end motherboards for desktop
> use of Athlon 64s? Chipset recommendations are welcome as well!

First off, understand the term "chipset" is rather useless in describing 
whether an A64/Opteron is a "good" or "poor" design.
Mainbaord manufacturers can cut corners regardless of chipset.
For more of what I'm talking about, see my 2004 November article in Sys 
Admin magazine (http://www.samagm.com).

Secondly, how high-end?

Tyan just released the S2895 ($450) which uses the nVidia Professional 
2200 (CPU0) + nVidia Professional 2050 (CPU1) + AMD 8131 (CPU0) chips.
It has about 3x the I/O throughput of the normal nForce4 - especially 
the PCI-X (that is PCI-X - *not* PCIe aka PCI-Express) slots (8x the PCI 
throughput).
There is a darth of PCIe storage controllers so if you go with a 3Ware 
storage device, you don't want to put it in a lowly, shared PCI slot 
like most nForce4/KT890 PCIe mainbaords have or it will saturate it's 
legacy PCI bus.

You'll want a mainbaord with multiple PCI-X channels c/o an AMD 8131 or 
8132.
If you haven't notice by now, you can "mix'n match" different 
HyperTransport chips in A64/Opteron - and there is no "fixed" concept of 
a chipset.

Otherwise, most of the nForce4 and KT890 mainboards coming out with PCIe 
are nice and now $100-150.
PCIe delivers *dedicated* serial PCI channels - even x1 is 0.25GBps 
compared to the "shared" 0.125GBps that *all* PCI cards share (except 
those with PCI-X c/o an added AMD8131/8132 chips -- which offer 8-16x 
the throughput over 2 channels).
The downside is that PCIe is not compatible with PCI, which means it 
doesn't help segment legacy PCI cards (again, that's PCI-X).
But PCIe is much cheaper to implement and provide 4x+ the I/O 
  previously found in PCI-only mainbaords (without the cost of PCI-X -- 
e.g., mainbaords costing $100-150 instead of $350-500+).
Which is where PCIe really matters (and not so much AGP x8 v. PCIe x16 
for video - Tom's Hardware showed that PCIe x4 is within 2-3 percent of 
max performance for today's cards).

Can't vouche for the KT890 (ViA always seems to change ATA logic way too 
much), but other than the NIC, the nForce4 mainbaords have GPL drivers 
supported by nVidia (and even the NIC has a GPL driver, forcedeth, but 
it's not supported by nVidia and it seems to be flaky at GbE speeds - 
hence the proprietary nvnet driver).
Most nForce4 mainboards are coming with a 2nd NIC off-nForce that is 
connected to the shared PCI (or PCI-X in the case of high-end baords), 
as well as using an off-nForce audio controller in the ALC850 or ALC860 
which is supported by ALSA (although the nForce MCP-integrated audio is 
supported as well, most mainbaord vendors are not opting for it).
SATA and other components are supported in *legacy* ATA mode (i.e., turn 
off AHCI support which is still forthcoming).


--
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org
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