Is it true the Chaintech A64 board doesnt work with mobile a64's ?

[Gautam]

Get the Gigabyte? What does that mean, your as confused about "one forum" as I am about "the gigabyte"? GA-K8NS PRO, GA-K8N PRO, GA-K8VT800, GA-K8VT800M, GA-K8VNXP or GA-K8NNXP are all options. Second can you verify the mobiles work in any of these boards?

Edit And finally there is the SiS board GA-K8S760M w/ SiS760/964.... Now I don't know about 760 but the south bridge gets killer reviews...

I can confirm that they work in the K8N Pro, and K8NS Pro. They should also be able to work in the higher trimlines. One would expect that the VIA boards would have support as well, but I've never heard of anyone with one.

I agree, the SiS boards look very very interesting. I'd like to see at least a couple of people with them in the real world, before any conclusions are made.

But can someone answer my PCI bus question? Both Bar81 and Hitechjb1(very intelligent members) have brought this up as a shortcoming. How much does it really hurt performance, if at all? Because this looks like the defining distinction between the 250GB and non-GB.

 

[BeerHunter]

I can confirm that they work in the K8N Pro, and K8NS Pro. They should also be able to work in the higher trimlines. One would expect that the VIA boards would have support as well, but I've never heard of anyone with one.

I agree, the SiS boards look very very interesting. I'd like to see at least a couple of people with them in the real world, before any conclusions are made.

But can someone answer my PCI bus question? Both Bar81 and Hitechjb1(very intelligent members) have brought this up as a shortcoming. How much does it really hurt performance, if at all? Because this looks like the defining distinction between the 250GB and non-GB.

Well these people disagree with you highly Link , and my guess is having so many IRQs is limiting FSB speed to 166?

"You mentioned that you can't get a DTR to post...what bios are you using? I can't get a mobile Athlon64 to post, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do T_T. Maybe go to a shop and see if I can't borrow a different proc and flash to the beta bios."

 

[Gautam]

Weird, I could've sworn I'd seen a couple of people using DTR's+K8NS...I'll double check.

The memory has nothing to do with the motherboard, and certainly nothing to do with IRQ's... It's the A64's memory controller that causes headaches with 2x double-sided sticks. This is true for every motherboard on the market, and will continue to be until AMD changes their onboard memory controller. It seems to be similar to what the first Springdale/Canterwood boards experienced. The stress that the extremely low latency controller puts on the memory causes them to crap out more often than not. Personally, I wouldn't use anything other than BH5 if you're using double-sided modules, for now at least. It doesn't have anything to do with the board, contrary to what the participants in that thread seem to think. The fundamental difference between the a64 and other architectures is that the mem controller is on-die. It doesn't have anything to do with the board.

 

[Bar81]

I can confirm that they work in the K8N Pro, and K8NS Pro. They should also be able to work in the higher trimlines. One would expect that the VIA boards would have support as well, but I've never heard of anyone with one.

I agree, the SiS boards look very very interesting. I'd like to see at least a couple of people with them in the real world, before any conclusions are made.

But can someone answer my PCI bus question? Both Bar81 and Hitechjb1(very intelligent members) have brought this up as a shortcoming. How much does it really hurt performance, if at all? Because this looks like the defining distinction between the 250GB and non-GB.

Sorry for the delay. It really depends upon your usage. The PCI bus can be very easily saturated. For example, on my i850e setup that I've since sold I had a promise fasttrack TX4 SATA PCI card with two Seagate 7200.7 80GB drives in RAID 0 and two 120GB models in RAID1. The RAID 0 was the boot drive(s) and the RAID 1 was my storage drive. While having two torrents open and downloading to the RAID1 array I attempted to play ToEE which was loaded on the RAID 0 array and upon playing the game the system would chug as the PCI bus was saturated. It's perfectly possible the PCI bus may never get saturated depending on what you have on it, but if you have the SATA controller with a Raptor or two in RAID plus a soundcard plus the ethernet NIC then it's very likely that the PCI bus will be saturated. I also think many people assign the blame elsewhere when in fact they're having a saturation issue. Like in the above example I could have claimed it was the video card or hard drive loading but the thing was that when I stopped the torrent downloads the problem went away (and the torrent usage was 0-2% in case you were wondering). I also checked CPU usage and with the torrents open it never approached 100% during those times.

 

[hitechjb1]

Let me look at the issue from an analysis stand point.

In the pre-nforce2 era, the frequency ratio between the system bus (FSB) and PCI is 4:1, 5:1.

In nforce2 era, the ratio becomes 6:1, 7:1.

In the A64 era, with the system bus (HT bus) going towards 1000 MHz, such discrepancy between the system bus and the PCI is very huge, a BW ratio of 60 to 1.

That is why PCI-e has to come in to level the bandwidth difference.

PCI 32 bit, 33 MHz, max BW = 132 MB/s
HT bus 1000 MHz, max BW = 8 GB/s (one way)
PCI-express 16X, 168 pins, maxBW = 5 GB/s

Devices that are connected to PCI in an A64 system create performance and bandwidth imbalance between such devices, the system bus, and in turns the CPU and memory.

That is why I prefer 250 GB as its networking and RAID (part of) are native in the south bridge, not through the PCI bridge.

 

[Bar81]

Very good point.

 

[unreal]

thank you, these thread has been good info, for the amd 64 m/b's.. i think ill go with a giga, for the system