Building new Athlon AMD64 Socket 939 or 940 machine
Nate Eldredge
nge at cs.hmc.edu
Mon Nov 28 06:01:15 GMT 2005
On Sun, 27 Nov 2005, Cian Hughes wrote:
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> Hey, I'm in no rush on this one, but I'm planning on building a new Athlon
> AMD64 machine, It's primarily as a voip server and file storage box for home
> use and will have 8 SATA (possibly SATA-II) drives attached to a RAID 5 card,
> probably Highpoint (but i'm open on this).
>
> I am wondering, what have people on this list built recently, within these
> bounds, I'm looking to choose a motherboard with one or two 1000Base-T
> Ethernet ports (to keep PCI's free for other things, ISDN card, TV Tuner,
> etc...), if possible what has and hasn't worked, i'm not too worried about
> onboard HD controllers, etc.
>
> Basically, before I buy I want to avoid any mistakes that people have already
> hit, I know there is a supported hardware list, but is their an advised
> hardware list for FreeBSD, especially with regard to RAID Cards and
> Motherboards.
Hi Cian,
I put together a machine a couple months ago. I used a Tyan S2875ANRF
("Tiger K8W") dual-Opteron motherboard and a single Opteron 244 (1.8 GHz)
cpu (second one may come in the future). I am running 5.4 and have been
very happy with it.
I decided it was worth going for Opteron over Athlon 64. They seem to
have better performance (wider memory bus, etc), obviously SMP ability,
and as I understand it the regular Athlon 64s don't support ECC memory
which I insist upon. The Athlon 64FX appear to be similar to the fastest
Opterons and differ mainly for price marketing purposes (sold to gamers).
I had a disk-related panic/crash once, I cannot remember the details. It
never recurred. The board has a SiI 3114 SATA controller, and I believe
support for SiI is not perfect, so that may be the cause; or the
dirt-cheap disk. If you are going to use your own controller then this
probably has nothing to do with you. I don't know anything about RAID
hardware, sorry.
It has an onboard 1000BaseT port with em controller. This works
perfectly, though I only use it at 100Mb since I don't have a gigabit
switch.
There are 5 pci slots and 1 agp. No vga on board. I threw in an old junk
pci vga card because I only use it for text (no X on the box, it's mostly
headless). It also has serial ports which could be useful for headless
operation. Supposedly the BIOS setup also supports a serial console.
Sound, USB and Firewire are on board. I have not tried them.
It doesn't support dual-core opteron, if that's something you wanted.
The only other thing that didn't work immediately is the cpu temperature
sensor (Winbond W83627HF). There is a hardware bit you have to twiddle to
enable it, which mbmon doesn't do. I wrote my own utility to read the
sensor after reading the datasheet, which of course you are welcome to if
you wind up with this board.
So I would recommend this board/cpu based on my experience so far. It's a
good value for the money.
I hope this is of some value to you. Let me know if you want to know any
more.
--
Nate Eldredge
nge at cs.hmc.edu
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