Asus Motherboard for Opteron 200 Processors Model SK8N Retail

[hallen]

$199.99

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduct.asp?DEPA=&submit=Go&description=sk8n

(ETA8/1/2003.)

http://images10.newegg.com/productimage/13-131-465-01.JPG

[TC]

Ouch that's expensive :eek:

[hallen]

Originally posted by TC
Ouch that's expensive :eek:

It's getting better than the $500. Server boards.

I think I'm going to take the plunge. When I picked up my first Asus A7M266 DDR board it was about that price and the Thunderbird 1.2GHz w/266MHz bus was about the same price as an Opteron 240 is now.

That was way back when Intel was pushing the socket 423 P4 and telling everyone to go out and buy Rambus memory.

I got a lot of work out of the A7m266 and it still runs but with a Thoroughbred now. Maybe the Opteron will serve as well.

Harvey

[hallen]

64bit Computing

Applications operating on very large data sets, such as database systems, perform best when as much of their data is in memory as possible rather than on disk. The access times for today's DRAM systems are roughly 100 times faster than today's fastest disk drives. Databases are on the forefront of applications that have an almost unlimited need for memory because of their large working sets. To efficiently address large amounts of memory beyond the 4 GB limits of today's 32-bit x86 systems, these RDBMS require 64-bit processors to support physical and virtual addressing powerfully and efficiently.

At present, high-end RISC servers routinely ship with 8, 16, 32, or even 100 GB of physical memory. Low-end servers today are going out with 512 MB or 1 GB. As prices for DRAM continue to drop, it has become very cost effective to build systems with greater than 4 GB of memory. With the price of memory currently below $250 for 1 GB of ECC DDR memory, 8 GB costs less than $2,000.

Because of the continuously declining costs of memory, the expectation is for low-end systems to be shipping with 2, 4, and 8 GB over the next two or three years. These systems must be able to address physical memory beyond the 4 GB limit. Current x86 processors support accessing memory beyond this limit through extensions such as Addressing Windowing Extensions (AWE) and Physical Address Extension (PAE), but they are non-portable, cumbersome to program, difficult to optimize performance, and are limited to accessing at most 64 GB of memory.

A flat 64-bit address model is necessary to overcome these limits to gain maximum performance. The Opteron processor can address up to 1 TB (1000 GB) of physical memory and 256 TB of virtual address space. This will enable systems based on the Opteron processor to efficiently use memory well beyond the 4 GB limits of today's 32-bit x86 processors.



more:

http://www.devx.com/amd/Article/16019

Memory space shouldn't affect Seti but Data Base programming pays the bills.

Harvey

[Demont]

I say do it Hallen! I'm behind you 100%!

I would love to "take the plunge" on this as well... but I think I'll wait to see how it goes for you first. :)

[edit] uh oh looks like the price says $299.99 now. :confused:

[TC]

Yep the price is going up a couple of other places I found that board. I'm going to let others be the pioneers with this platform.

[hallen]

Yup. Must have been a typo. Wonder if newegg would have honored a pre-order at $199.99?

Well for now it's out of my price range. Thinking of a pair of Barton 2500+'s @ $87. for the A7M266-D.:D That'll show them.

Harvey

[Just shoot]

LINK (http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/article.php?cat=&id=223&pagenumber=4) to some of the benchies looks like it could be promising, exspecially with the version 1.3 boards to start arriving soon.