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The tyan s2895 (thunder k8we)
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8we.html

(just preordered one myself),

The Iwill DK8EW and DK8ES
http://www.iwillusa.com/product_2.asp?p_id=91&sp=Y

However, the Athlon-FX does not have enough coherent HT links for multiple cpus, so you will have to use the opteron 2xx series. As for dual 16x vs dual 8x, there is no real world performance diff.

Also, there are number of other mobo makers with similar boards on the way based on the nvidia 2200, 2050, and amd 8131/8132 chips.

IWILL makes an 8-way motherboard. They claim 128 Gb of RAM will fit.

I'm pretty sure that the 1U rack statement is an error, but there are 32 DIMM slots. I have no idea if one could actually get a 4 GB stick, but with 2 GB sticks that's 64 GB.

http://www.iwillusa.com/product_2.asp?p_id=90

Tony

then how about the Iwill DK8S2-SATA?

AMD chipset
16GB RAM
dual gigabit lan
4 SATA connectors with raid
2 Ultra/133 ports
2 PCI-X slots
2 PCI 64-bit/66MHz slots
2 PCI 32-bit/33MHz slots

Iwill DK8N

No, but IA-32 motherboard manufacturers go a good number of steps further. ;) I recommend that you investigate Intel's Placer (E7505) chipset and motherboards based on it (several of Supermicro's offerings, as well as offerings from Tyan and other manufacturers, e.g. the Iwill DPL533 and DP533. These motherboards support 133 MHz QDR system buses (coming to 533 million transfers a second), matched (quite well) with two channels of PC2100 DDR SDRAM (resulting in 4.267 GB/s of memory bandwidth that is actually utilizable by the processors, since the memory bandwidth matches the system bus bandwidth, unlike Apple's offering, which is bottlenecked by the system bus at just 1.333 GB/s, whether you have one processor or two). (And I'm certain that 200 MHz QDR Xeon chipsets are not far off in the future, since Intel in general appears to be headed in that direction.)

No, but IA-32 motherboard manufacturers go a good number of steps further. ;) I recommend that you investigate Intel's Placer (E7505) chipset and motherboards based on it (several of Supermicro's offerings, as well as offerings from Tyan and other manufacturers, e.g. the Iwill DPL533 and DP533. These motherboards support 133 MHz QDR system buses (coming to 533 million transfers a second), matched (quite well) with two channels of PC2100 DDR SDRAM (resulting in 4.267 GB/s of memory bandwidth that is actually utilizable by the processors, since the memory bandwidth matches the system bus bandwidth, unlike Apple's offering, which is bottlenecked by the system bus at just 1.333 GB/s, whether you have one processor or two). (And I'm certain that 200 MHz QDR Xeon chipsets are not far off in the future, since Intel in general appears to be headed in that direction.)

Take a real good look at AMD's roadmaps:

Dual Cla-whammers are GONE.

AMD evidently decided to force the enthusiast/mini-server market to choose to buy-up ( dual sledge-hammers, and at the prices involved .. NBL ), or

buy-down ( Dual Athlons

Mean ( well, not really mean, but .. wahh!! . . ), but effective ( for their bottom-line ).

Mind you, there are 2 other significant concerns in replacing my system ( I'm in the segment they .. decided to ignore ):

1. Silent System: .. those Cla-whammer HSFs look huge/possibly-noisy, or, if the chips really are low-wattage, then they'll be really silent under a copper HS with a Verax.de fan on it, and

2. as someone else mentioned, HD CPU usage, but the solution for that ( waitaminit, we dissolve stuff to fix our PC's? ) is to use Serial-ATA ( non-blocking, and non-redundancy-of-commands ).
And with Linux, the Silicon Image chip based S-ATA controllers are supported in 2.6, so grab these, then, rather than the non-open-source HighPoint, or the outright opposed-to-open-source Promise.

Lost Circuits Benchmarks ( stunning ), and CyberCPU.net ( it's the low-CPU, 8% vs 44%, that puts S-ATA into the phenomenosphere ), and .. I'd heard that Seagate is implementing out-of-order-execution for its upcoming S-ATA drives, which oughta make 'em punchier..

( for the TLA-challenged, the CLA in Cla-whammer, the new AMD desktop chip, stands for the Canadian Luge Association, and if these chips are able to flatten luge , they're damn capable, and..
the above usage of NBL stands for Not Bloody Likely, as rememberers of the film-version of Pygmalion may remember.. My Bloody Fair Lady, I think it were callethed.. hmmm.. )

Take a real good look at AMD's roadmaps:

Dual Cla-whammers are GONE.

AMD evidently decided to force the enthusiast/mini-server market to choose to buy-up ( dual sledge-hammers, and at the prices involved .. NBL ), or

buy-down ( Dual Athlons

Mean ( well, not really mean, but .. wahh!! . . ), but effective ( for their bottom-line ).

Mind you, there are 2 other significant concerns in replacing my system ( I'm in the segment they .. decided to ignore ):

1. Silent System: .. those Cla-whammer HSFs look huge/possibly-noisy, or, if the chips really are low-wattage, then they'll be really silent under a copper HS with a Verax.de fan on it, and

2. as someone else mentioned, HD CPU usage, but the solution for that ( waitaminit, we dissolve stuff to fix our PC's? ) is to use Serial-ATA ( non-blocking, and non-redundancy-of-commands ).
And with Linux, the Silicon Image chip based S-ATA controllers are supported in 2.6, so grab these, then, rather than the non-open-source HighPoint, or the outright opposed-to-open-source Promise.

Lost Circuits Benchmarks ( stunning ), and CyberCPU.net ( it's the low-CPU, 8% vs 44%, that puts S-ATA into the phenomenosphere ), and .. I'd heard that Seagate is implementing out-of-order-execution for its upcoming S-ATA drives, which oughta make 'em punchier..

( for the TLA-challenged, the CLA in Cla-whammer, the new AMD desktop chip, stands for the Canadian Luge Association, and if these chips are able to flatten luge , they're damn capable, and..
the above usage of NBL stands for Not Bloody Likely, as rememberers of the film-version of Pygmalion may remember.. My Bloody Fair Lady, I think it were callethed.. hmmm.. )

When it comes down to it, you only get cost-effective scalability by using distributed systems or clustering. In fact, for really large systems, it's the only possible way at all.

Three years ago you would have been right, but today the cheapest way to (nearly) double your computing power is to put in a dual processor board. I.e., the day of the home dual-processor has arrived. For example, you can now get a dual processor Athlon board for $200, and in spite of what the docs say, you can put $50 processors in it instead of the $500 big brothers AMD recommends.

It's only a matter of time before you start seeing 3D games that can take advantage of dual processor configurations. In fact, they already can in the sense that if a single-threaded game can load up one processor 100% and your box still remains entirely responsive for other applications. That is, you can play Return to Castle Wolfenstein at the same time you run a compile.

Actually, my IWill KK266 PLus-R motherboard comes with a driver CD that boots into a barebones customized implementation of Linux for this purpose.

Actually, my IWill KK266 PLus-R motherboard comes with a driver CD that boots into a barebones customized implementation of Linux for this purpose.

...but Promise Technology makes a network-attached storage device that uses ATA drives instead of SCSI. They also make an interesting external storage subsystem which uses ATA drives, but is SCSI-attached. I may get one of those myself and fill it full of IBM Deskstar 60GXP goodness.

I know that at least one motherboard manufacturer (Iwill) has onboard ATA RAID on some of its more recent boards (according to Maximum PC magazine's August 2001 issue, the KK266-R for Athlons with PC100/133 SDRAM, last I heard it was selling for $110). Do not know anything about usability of this device in various operating systems though. You'd think it would be implemented in hardware, so the OS just sees one disk device that represents the mirrorset, but I wouldn't swear to anything...

No, I don't work for Promise or Iwill, or any of their suppliers or business partners.

Which slotkets did you try? Only very few, such as the Abit Slotket III and the Iwill Slocket II will do dual FC-PGA out of the box. Some others can be modified. This should get you dual even with older cA2 steppings, except for 500 and 550 Mhz chips.

Provided your motherboard can provide the right voltage for the Coppermine and your BIOS supports it, the Abit Slotket III or the new revision of the Iwill Slocket II will both do dual FC-PGA Coppermine out of the box. Some popular slightly older slotkets like the MSI BX Master rev 2 and the Soltek SL-02A+ can be modified for dual Cu with a bit of soldering.

You might still be able to use a Cu on other motherboards with the Soltek SL-02D, which draws its power from a drive connector and provides the right Cu voltage through its own voltage regulator, even if the motherboard can't provide it. Unfortunately, this slotket is not yet dual capable.

You are right, 256 MB is a little weak. My personal computer has 384 MB of RAM... The motherboard they used for the test was an Iwill DCA200. This board will support up to 2 GB of RAM. I think the reason that they only used 256 MB was because that much RDRAM memory runs about $1,100. Peguin Computing has an 8-way Xeon system that will support up to 32 GB of ECC SDRAM memory. I am sure there are other x86 based machines like this, but I don't know of any off hand.

Actually, I believe these new Celerons can run on the BP6 using an FCPGA to PPGA riser card which should be available at the same time the Celeron II is released. Also, these chips may be able to run on a dual slot 1 board using a slotket from Iwill or the Slotket III from Abit.