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Hi Guys,

I'm building a dual opteron system based on a Tyan 8kw thunderboard (s2885)l. Since it only has one 3.3v pci slot (the rest is pci-x) I'll be hooking up a magma chassis for the pulsar cards.

The question is; do the CW cards work on a dual proc system (and esp. the opterons)?
I understand that CW doesn't recommend it, but does this mean it plainly doesn't work or that they haven't really tested it yet?

Anyone else using this kind of system with CW cards succesfully?

Cheers,

Joe

cw has been fine with duals for a while. i have a machine with dual slot1 p3s(!) that works great...

I hate to be a nay-sayer, but having spent a number of weeks debugging AGP issues on the K8W, I would tend to classify it as a bleeding edge board. I think Intel's ICH and ICHR's are better than the Sil's as well.

If it were I, I would instead try to go for something dual-Xeon, and perhaps with more 32-bit slots on it. Just my 2 cents. We have had really good performance on our Supermicro dual-xeon motherboards over here.

I think the K8W reviews on the net have been a bit too optimistic on the stability of the board. And in general, I wouldn't call Tyan the best MOBO maker on the planet.

Again, this is just my experience. YMMV.

Stable supermicro dual xeon here...

Just a brief followup.

The PCI-X slots may be 32-bit capable. I'm not totally clear on what will and won't work in those slots, so that may be a plus for the Tyan K8W.

But I will reiterate that our experience here has not been good related to AGP issues. We have two K8W's here, and both of them have done some blue-screens that have not inspired confidence in their stability.

I think the Opteron 150 single-proc looked pretty enticing as it was coming out. That's a socket 939. You might want to look at that kind of setup. Still AMD chipsets I bet though, so hard to say if it is going to work any better.

It just seems like a tough time to build. The Intel LGA775 925X stuff looks bleeding edge. The PCIe slots don't seem to have stabilized in terms of total channels and so forth. And if you already have an AGP graphics card, that's a real money loser. Plus the thermal requirements on the new LGA775 CPU's at 3.4 and 3.6 GHz, and higher latency DDR2 memory... the market seems a bit in flux at the moment.

So... my latest audio build was an 875P chipset, and a Northwood (not Prescott) 3.0GHz CPU. DDR-400 low latency memory. The CPU is idleing at about 91degF, and that is something that is important to me.

Other people seem to be doing great with the K8T800 chipsets and AMD Athlon 64 on Socket 775. MSI seems to be doing pretty well there. So those are known quantities.

Tom's Hardware did do a good review of the workstation level architectures recently here. Interesting to note that he had to RMA his K8W also... Killer stuff, yes. But I really with Tyan or AMD could get this thing to be solid and stable on the AGP slot...

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040927/index.html