Wanted: Good mobo for Intel 850E chipset and 1066 RDRAM

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings, and thanks for your reply!

Mark Hahn <hahn at physics.mcmaster.ca> writes:

> > OK, we're thinking about the Asus P4T533 motherboards with 1066 RAMBUS
> > memory.  This is a 16-node cluster upgrade.  Our old network was
> 
> have you considered waiting for the upcoming intel dual-ddr chipset?
> 

We've thought about it.  Any idea how long we're talking?  

Its funny you mention this, as we did a quick search for dual channel
ddr shortly after I sent the first email.  In general, we'd *much*
prefer this for forward compatibility and avoidance of nasty legal
behavior in hardware suppliers :-).  All we came up with, of course,
is the well known nVidia board for athlons, and dual Xeon boards based
on the E7500 chipset.  Unfortunately, with 2 cpus on a dual E7500
board, one would need 8.4 Gb memory bandwidth to match the peak output
of both CPUs, as the 4.2 Gb RAMBUS 1066 does for one CPU now.  Putting
in Dual DDR 2100 will only supply half the bandwidth to run both CPU's
at peak. 

Its a crazy idea, but maybe the best thing to do is to get these dual
boards with only 1 cpu in each.  Maybe as a future upgrade, there
might be DDR 4200 ram that we could run on these boards, and we could
add the extra cpu as a reasonably inexpensive upgrade.

Another plus, as you note below, is that many come with integrated
Intel Gigabit ethernet.

Does anyone have experience with the Iwill DXP, for example?

Take care,

> > kernel.  Unfortunately, the Asus motherboards only have 32bit/33Mhz
> > PCI slots.  As best as we can figure, this will shave a factor of 2
> 
> gross.  I'd be astonished of the dual-ddr chipset didn't have pci-x,
> and quite possibly builtin gigabit.
> 
> > the SSE2 instructions), and something less but still high on
> > memory-bottleneck problems.  So the capability of the machine is being
> 
> I expect that dual-PC2100 will wind up being pretty close (either way)
> compared to rdram1066.
> 
> > PC800 motherboards with a faster PCI slot.  Of course, if anyone knows
> > of a motherboard supporting both RAMBUS 1066 and either 64bit PCI or
> > 66Mhz PCI, that would be ideal, but such animals apparently do not yet
> 
> why are you so set on rambus?
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Camm Maguire			     			camm at enhanced.com
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."  --  Baha'u'llah