AMD Cleaning Intel's Clocks 6723

On Wed, 07 Dec 2005 23:43:57 GMT, Aragorn

I don't drink coffee. Guess our agreeing days are numbered.

Yes, despite the older memory technology, it really shows what good interconnects can do.

I've had good luck with Gigabyte, but not every has. I do a lot of research before I buy a board, and I make sure I get the good ones (grin).

I've got a pile of AGP cards here. It's the new VLB.

While I prefer SCSI on a server, primarily because SCSI drives have more thorough quality controls than IDE drives (part of the reason they're more expensive), i've been pretty happy with SATA. I won't go back to PATA unless I have to.

NCQ = Native Command Queing. Also called "elevator algorithms". It allows the drive to Queue requests and process the next one that's closest to it's current head locaiton, which improves mulbreastasking performance.

Since i'm not running a high throughput server room, I don't really mind onboard NIC's anymore (and the nVidia NIC offloads a lot to the nForce4 chipset). I'm also not a major audio nut, so onboard sound is fine for me. More cards just means more heat.

AMD really isn't in the chipset business. They only produce chipsets for reference implementations, and expect third parties to pick up the slack. I'm fine with that, given how little effort they put into them.

Yeah, I've got a SE7520BD2, and it works great when you get the correct magic incantation (correct hardware configuration). When intel gives you a validated hardware list, stick to it. Going outside what they validate usally leads to a lot of trouble. I put 16GB in this machine and had to send 4 sets of RAM back before I got a stable configuration.

It's also got an upgraded RAID controller with RAID-5 SCSI, and it's a dream.

Also, if you're going to go Intel Server boards? Spend the ching to buy an Intel chbuttis. I've got it in a SC5300 and everything just fits like it was made for each other (which it was).

I stuck with my good old Abit BX board for years. It was a solid chipset, and things didn't change very often. It worked really well. Then all hell broke loose and Intel started playing the chipset of the month game.

That happened to one of my boards too. I had two Seagate baracuda drives mirrored for data protection, but the power surge went through my power supply and fried the exact same chip in both drives (you could see the melted traces). Strangely, my 2 maxtor drives were fine. After that, I refused to buy seagate again (lost some important stuff).

If you're going to mirror drives, make sure they're not the same exact model and type, otherwise you risk this kind of thing.

After that, the machine was never quite the same though, and had frequent network and other instability issues. I eventually replaced it with an Intel Gigabyte board, but shortly after that went back to AMD.

Sounds like an adventure.