Help me find a good M/B

[Pentium100]

It seems that the time to upgrade is coming :). I have started to look for suitable motherboard, CPU and video card (if I have to). My current devices:
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (Palomino core)
M/B: ASUS A7V600-X (VIA KT600 chipset)
VGA: ATI Radeon 9800Pro 256MB (AGP)

I want AMD 64 bit processor (Athlon64 or Opteron) on Socket 939 or 940 for the future). It should support dual core CPUs.

I would like a motherboard with PCIe (because AGP versions of newer cards are (or soon will be) not manufactured). Of course I would like to have an AGP->PCIe adapter so as not to have to cange the VGA at this time), but it seems that the adapter does not exist (or is very expensive).

VIA chipsets (or at least the older ones, mine included) have problems with PCI bus speed, so, if available, I would rather use a motherboard with some other chipset.

I would like a motherboard which supports dual CPUs for use with Opterons.

Everything seems fine until now (there are many motherboards that could match my conditions). Here comes the difficult part:

PCI slots.
I have 5 PCI cards and want to use all of them with my new motherboard. Two cards are PCI-X, so it would be nice if that motherboard had at least one PCI-X slot.

One of the PCI cards is a serial port, so if a motherboard has two serial ports, it may have only 4 PCI slots.

If a PCI slot is directly below a VGA slot, then it does not count (because the if I inserted a card there, the VGA would overheat and some VGAs block that slot).

Oh, and the price: combined CP?U and motherboard price should not exceed $800 (it would be nice if it did not exceed $500, would be more money for VGA).

Any suggestions?

[hockey man]

5 PCI slots . . .what all do you have in there? The problem with that is most modern socket 939 MOBOs only have 3 ususally. You'll have to wait for Saphalline, as I am not familiar with socket 940. One thing to think about, CPUs are going to be changing drastically very soon. However, they are proabbly going to be leaving PCI at 3 since it is mostly dead. Would you be willing to sacrifice some PCI slots for a modern system?

[Pentium100]

What do I have in those slots:

Sound: SB Live! 5.1 (will upgrade some time, until then I want to have the slot and use this card)
TV: Leadtek WinFast PVR2000 (I doubt that any motherboard will have integrated TV tuner with hardware MPEG2 encoding)
NIC: 100mbps (already bought a new NIC which has two ports (100mbps) and supports bus mastering, PCI-X).
SCSI: Adaptec 39160 PCI-X (Unless the motherboard has integrated dual channel SCSI, this card stays)
PORT: serial port (if the motherboard has two serial ports, I do not need this card).

[saphalline]

If you want to use PCI-X, you're looking at a workstation mobo right away. There are no consumer-oriented mobo's with PCI-X. The new CPU changes that are coming this summer are on the consumer end of things, so you don't necessarily need to worry about them.

My recommendation: look at Tyan's and Soyo's offerings for the dual-Socket 939 arena, preferably using the NForce4 Pro chipset. Both mobo manufacturers have a lot of compelling products using this chipset, and offer a variety of supporting Southbridge chips for your needs. I doubt that any of them have both AGP and PCIe x16, but you can check. Such is the price of supporting PCI-X.

[rond36]

Saph, Opterons use socket 940.

This motherboard is a candidate for my next system build but I want the Tyan S2895A2NRF W/O SCSI because I will be adding an Adaptec 4800SAS RAID 133MHz PCI-X card


You may want to look at the Tyan S2895UA2NRF (Thunder K8WE S2895) (http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8we_spec.html)

Each processor has its own 4 slot bank of memory

It has an AMD 8131 chipset and each processor has its own I/O hub

NVIDIA nForce 4 Professional 2200 (CK8-04) Connected to CPU 1
NVIDIA nForce 4 Professional 2050 (I/O-4) Connected to CPU 2

It doesn't have an AGP slot but it has two x16 PCI Express FULL SPEED slots
Slot1 PCI-E x16 from nForce™ Prof. 2200
Slot3 PCI-E x16 from nForce™ Prof. 2050
with SLI support :D

Two independent 64-bit PCI-X buses
Slot 4 & 5: PCI-X 100 MHz max. (Bridge B)
Slot 6: PCI-X 133 MHz max. (Bridge A)
One 32-bit 33MHz PCI v2.3 (Slot 2)


You won't need your new NIC it has duel gigabit LAN.

Two IEEE 802.3 Nvidia MAC 1000/100/10
Ethernet (1st from nForce™ Prof. 2200, 2nd from nForce Prof. 2050)

Has onboard SCSI so you won't need the Adaptec card
Integrated SCSI Controller
LSI 53C1030 U320 SCSI controller
Two U320 68-pin SCSI connectors
Connected to PCI-X Bridge B

The board supports single and duel-core Opteron 200 series CPUs including the new Opteron 285

I have only found 3 bad things about the board.
The price about US $500.00 there goes your budget.
You have to install 2 CPUs or half of the the board doesn't work.
Only 1 32bit PCI slot and it is between the two PCI-E slots. :eek:

If CPU 2 is not installed anything connected to the 2050 I/O hub, PCI-X bridge B, or in slot 3,4,or 5 will not work including the SCSI controller.

[saphalline]

Saph, Opterons use socket 940.Doh! I meant to type "Socket 940".

Thanx for clearing that up.

[Pentium100]

Thank you for your information, at least I know that such a board exists.

The board that rond36 wrote about is quite good:) It has dual port LAN (but It is not written if it supports bus mastering) that could save me another PCI slot. The fact that it requires two processors to work is a bit disappointig, but overall it is fine. I do not need SLI, perhaps I will find a motherboard which has only one PCIe x16 slot (and five PCI slots)...

And one question: Do the processors have to be identical or one can be faster/slower or one dualcore, the other not?

[Pentium100]

And I think it is possible to use a normal (32bit/33MHz) PCI card in any PCI-X slot, right?

Does anyone know if tha integrated NIC supports bus mastering (or produces >50% CPU load while transferring data)?

[saphalline]

And I think it is possible to use a normal (32bit/33MHz) PCI card in any PCI-X slot, right?Correct.

Does anyone know if tha integrated NIC supports bus mastering (or produces >50% CPU load while transferring data)?:eek: 50% CPU load for a NIC!? What are you crazy? You think anyone would accept that in this day and age? No frickin' way!! All modern network adapters better do their own work or out they go! In the case of the latest chipsets, the CPU load is down to 0-1% because the network adapters often have a direct connection to one of the bridge chips, and thus have a clear path to the storage subsystem.

You must be used to really old hardware if you think half a CPU is still required to power a NIC!

[jlreich]

Correct.
Hehe, you had me all confused there for a minute. It's way to easy to think about PCI-E when you say PCI-X. :p

You just don't hear about PCI-X very often these days.

[saphalline]

I know, I hate that! Why didn't they leave the name at "3GIO" or something? Why did they have to use the "PCI" sub-monicker? Plus, it doesn't make sense! PCI "extended" vs PCI "express" - the first two letters are the same for both! Can we say "instant confusion"? :eek:

Who comes up with this sh*t?

[rond36]

It has dual port LAN (but It is not written if it supports bus mastering) that could save me another PCI slot.

Bus mastering only applies to devices on a shared bus such as PCI or PCI-X. The two NICs on this board are on a dedicated bus strait to the I/O hub so bus mastering is not needed. Each NIC has its own I/O processor so it would not need to use the CPU to process data

Do the processors have to be identical or one can be faster/slower or one dualcore, the other not?

The processors are required to be identical the same as with every duel or multi processor motherboard. You will not find any duel or multi processor motherboard that will allow you to mix different processors they have to be the same right down to the stepping revision.

And I think it is possible to use a normal (32bit/33MHz) PCI card in any PCI-X slot, right?

A requirement of the PCI-X spec. is that it must be backward compatible with PCI 2.0 or above. You can identify a PCI 2.0 or above card by the notches in the contact edge it will have two notches each one 15mm from each end of the contact edge.
http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/productimage/29-102-176-07.JPG
Like your Sound Blaster live 5.1 sound card in the image above.

Don't forget to buy new RAM for this board it requires ECC registered DDR400(PC3200) and for duel channel to work for both CPUs you must install a minimum of 4 DIMMs (2 for each CPU)

As for the confusion between PCI-X and PCI-E you can blame PCI SIG for that, they developed both technologies. They should have named PCI-E something different to avoid the problem. PCI-X has been around for years in workstation and server systems and now PCI-E is moving into those systems replacing AGP as well as PCI and PCI-X. The SAS RAID card in my first post also has a PCI-E X4 version (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Submit=ENE&N=2000150410+1193220623&Subcategory=410&description=&srchInDesc=&minPrice=&maxPrice=) that would work in the second PCI-E X16 slot on this motherboard.

[Pentium100]

Thank you for clarification.

About the NICs: I did a test run: First, I closed all programs that use a lot of CPU. Then I copied a file in the same SCSI HDD (at about 30MB/s), to show how much CPU does the reading and writing of a hard disk use. Then, I started to transfer the same file over the network to my laptop (due to high fragmentation of the laptops hard drive, I only got 3MB/s). It took as much CPU as copying the file at 10x greater speed. If I got a 6MB/s transfer speed, the CPU usadge would increase to about 50%.

Oh, and the SCSI controller on that motherboard: Has it two channels or just two connectors? Because some of my SCSI devices are LVD, some are SE and I do not want to mix them together...

[mjc]

Who comes up with this sh*t?

Some marketing weenie...definitely not a 'real' computer geek.

[Pentium100]

Some marketing weenie...definitely not a 'real' computer geek.

From time to time someone comes up with confusing names. For example: "CD Video" (CDV) and "Video CD" (VCD).

[Pentium100]

Reading the manual made an impression that if I use only one CPU, I will not be able to access PCIe Slot 3 and the second NIC. There is nothing written about PCI-X or SCSI not working with one CPU.

[rond36]

You are right, you only lose 1 LAN port, 1 PCI-E slot, and 4 DIMM slots by installing only 1 CPU. I thought that the SCSI controller and PCI-X bridge B were connected to CPU 2 via the 2050 I/O hub but they are not, they are connected to CPU 1 via the 2200 I/O hub.

That was the only thing keeping me from buying this board :D

Try your test with the laptop initiating the transfer and see how much of the CPU the NIC uses, it will be almost nill. Your CPU isn't being used by the NIC. Your CPU has to process the file and load it tnto RAM and send it to the NIC for transfer to the laptop. The CPU usage will be the same no matter what type of NIC you have installed.

[Pentium100]

It was about the same CPU usage on the laptop during the transfer.

If so much CPU is used for transferring a file at 3MB/s, what will be the CPU usage with gigabit ethernet at full speed (120MB/s)? And why so much CPU is used by interrupts (red line)?

It is useful to download and read products manual before buying.

[rond36]

Check the CPU usage on the desktop when the transfer is initiated by the laptop. The laptop will have to process the file but the desktop will not so you will find out how much of the CPU is used to process the file and how much is used by the NIC to send it. Another consideration is this board with 2 duel-core Opterons would be 800% to 1000% faster than your Athlon XP 2000+ so that 50% processor usage would be like 5% spread across 4 CPU cores.

BTW Bus mastering is implemented by the motherboard chipset not individual devices attached to it.

[Pentium100]

I maybe used a wrong definition. What I meant saying "bus mastering" was something like DMA for hard drives. Intel, for example, makes NICs "desktop" and "server" versions, with "server" version being more expensive. They have to be different somehow...

Did a test run like you said. The file that was on the laptop is (likely) less fragmentes, so I got 8MB/s speed... at 90% CPU load. When I set 3MB/s as limit, the CPU usage was indeed smaller than the previous time. But you should see my point: at nearly full speed a integrated 100mbps NIC uses nearly 100% CPU.

Oh, and a side-note: I won't have dual core CPUs. I will be more than happy if I get two single core CPUs, the motherboard, 1-2GB RAM (registered RAM price is twice as highthan unregistered), VGA and a case ( I don't expect for that motherboard to fit in my current case).

[saphalline]

Did a test run like you said. The file that was on the laptop is (likely) less fragmentes, so I got 8MB/s speed... at 90% CPU load. When I set 3MB/s as limit, the CPU usage was indeed smaller than the previous time. But you should see my point: at nearly full speed a integrated 100mbps NIC uses nearly 100% CPU.What hardware are you using? And what drivers? And what program to do the transfer? These numbers are outrageous! I haven't seen a 50% CPU usage doing FTP since the Celeron 300 days! I have to wonder here how much of it is the NIC's chipset and how much of it is other factors (a highly fragmented laptop hard drive, for instance, would be a major bottleneck in a file transfer). Speed of the CPU's is one thing, but RAM configuration, hard drive fragmentation, chipsets of various components, drivers being used, and overall health of Windows are all contributing factors.

One thing is for certain: according to network tests that I've seen & done, 100% CPU usage with an AthlonXP 2000+ is way too high.

[Pentium100]

Maybe it's just that the integrated NIC is "software".

The NIC - it is shown in the device manager as "VIA Compatable Fast Ethernet Adapter". And the driver, guess what - is provided by Windows. Maybe this is the cause of that CPU usage...

The FTP server I use is Cerberusftp and the client is FlashFXP.

I have updated the driver using the CD that came with this motherboard. Now it says "Via Rhine II Fast Ethernet Adapter". Tried to transfer a file from laptop. Got ~6.5MB/s speed with 50-80% CPU load... Guess the driver was not the cause of this problem...

And I think that that the fragmentation of laptops hard drive should not have influence to the CPU usage on the desktop, right? And the driveI was transferring the file to could handle a lot more even if it's fragmented (of course, not so heavily as the laptop drive). It is quite fragmented, but only the files are fragmented, there are big chunks of free space.

[saphalline]

Depending on the age of the laptop. A heavily fragmented older laptop hard drive can only hit 6MB/s, so it does make a difference! Also, writing is slower than reading. Laptop hard drives only recently got up to the point where they are decent performers. Even so, they lag behind the latest desktop SATA 300 hard drives by quite a bit. RAM amounts will also have an effect, as well as the configuration (speed, dual-channel or not, timings, memory controller efficiency, etc). I imagine the drivers for the devices make a bit of a difference, too, but the overall effectiveness of the NIC chip has the biggest impact.

Also, a quick Google search for that NIC chip leads to the VIA Rhine-II VT6102 chip, and the results are not pleasant! Even if you aren't getting errors in Linux, I have to say that you are indeed having throughput problems with that thing. This may be why your figures look so horrendous! It's sad that you're going through these issues, but upgrading I think would fix them. Like I said, your figures are not normal by any means for that CPU!

[rond36]

Maybe you ought to dump the FTP program it isn't needed on a LAN. Windows Explorer can do amything your FTP program can.

Here is my CPU usage on my desktop while my laptop is downloading a huge 278MB folder containing 148 sub folders and 3298 files. I am using Windows Explorer and the onboard NIC on the desktop and the builtin WIFI on the laptop via a Linksys WRT54GS router
http://img257.imageshack.us/img257/4624/cuusage4zz.jpg
The spike is when I resized the Task Manager window.


and CPU usage at the same time on the laptop.
http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/9931/cpuusagelap5vz.jpg

[Pentium100]

My laptop is rather new Acer Aspire 5021WLMi. Its HDD does about 30MB/s linear reading. Yes, heavily fragmented hard drive will indeed affect the transfer rate, but it shouldn't affect the CPU usage on a different computer.

Tried to use Windows Explorer on the laptop. There was no change in the CPU usage of the desktop PC. This or the next week my new NIC should arrive, I will test it then.

Now you should know why I asked about the integrated NIC so much, I just want to know if this will be the situation (in that case I'd rather buy a external NIC together with the motherboard), but this seems to be my current motherboards problem...

[Pentium100]

Got and installed the new NIC. CPU load is about 30% when transferring at 6MB/s. Acceptable.

What's left for me to od is waitfor the money and buy the upgrade. Thank you for your help.

[rond36]

If you want more info on the Tyan Thunder K8WE S2895A2NRF or S2895UA2NRF check out http://www.k8we.com/ or the forums at http://forums.2cpu.com/ .

[Pentium100]

Thank you for the link. I read there that K8WE does not support two floppy drives. But, considering everythin that is only a minor problem...