opteron 146 thoughts on motherboards

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Fri, 2006-01-06 at 21:59 -0500, Robert L Cochran wrote:
> A big advantage is that you can recycle your existing memory sticks

You can do that on _all_ Socket-754 and 939 mainboards.  The 184 and 368
traces, 754 and 939 respectively, run directly to the CPU, and devide
their clock from it.  This is not front side bottleneck (FSB) Intel
technology where the memory clock affects the rest of the system.

So you can use DDR200 (PC1600), DDR266 (PC2100), DDR333 (PC2700) and
DDR400 (PC3200).  The only issue I've seen is maybe the number of DIMMs
you can use.  JEDEC specs specify 3 DIMMs per DDR200 channel, 2 DIMMs
per DDR266/333 channel and 1 DIMM per DDR400 channel.

> and video card to the Asrock.

Now that's one of the neat designs of the ULI M1695/1567.  They have a
_true_, _segmented_ AGP 3.0** slot, whereas some of the other
chipset/cheap designs just connect the AGP to the shared, 32-bit PCI
bus.  That's in addition to the PCIe x16 option.

[ **NOTE:  It must be newer 1.5/0.8V AGP x4/8 card.
  You can't use older 3.3V AGP x1/2/4 cards. ]

Of course, I don't know how well the peripherals of the ULI M1567 are,
so be _wary_ of possible Linux compatibility issues.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org
http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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Some things (or athletes) money can't buy.
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