Dual Opteron Goodness

[TiG]

Well after a long time of waiting for approval - delivery of goods etc, the system has finally arrived in pieces in time for me to build it.

I thought it was about time to get a few pictures up to let you see what all the fuss is about with opterons at least in a practical sense.....

I apologise for the picture quality in advance, its a crap works digital camera and i'm not a photographer by trade.

Pic 1
First very shakey picture

Pic 2
Full side view of the case, much better idea of the size and neatness of the case.

Pic 3
Nice front view of the case stood up with the polished aluminium front.

Pic 4
The nice thing about this case is that when i've finished my dev work on this it will nicely fit in the server rooms downstairs with a rack mount kit that fits to the sides....

The side bays for the dvd drive and floppy can be rotated like shown to allow sensible access the dvd drive etc

Pic 5
The left hand bay shown in picture 4 is full of sata drives.... shown closer here....

Pic 6
The neat back of the case superb for airflow with the rear fans attached....

This system in full specs is as follows...

Tyan S2880 motherboard
2 * 240 AMD opteron processors
2 * 1GB PC2700 ECC ram
6 * 120GB Quantum 8mb Cache Sata drives
1 * Adaptec Sata Raid controller (4 sata 120GB drives in Raid 5 - RED Cables on pictures)
Onboard raid 1 on other two drives (black cables)
Onboard ATI Rage XL graphics
LG DVD RAM +/- drive
Floppy disk to be removed shortly
Dual 500W psu with auto failover. in single height psu bay.

I'm chuffed with how it looks and the temperatures after 4hours of sisoft sandra burn in was averaging 35°C on the processors...

This machine even only being the 240 opterons is seriously fast, its designed to do load of DB processing and its doing million row transfers in about 1/5th the time the other dual 2.4gig Xeon systems we've got here.

Total system cost under £3k which for an equivilant dell is about £7.5K

Some benchmarks will follow shortly....

TiG

[joshwa]

man that is nice ! am very impressed by the case - looks Very sweet

i'm getting a dual slot 1 board soon so i'll have to show you some pics

[Bindibadgi]

I just want you to know TiG, that i hate you so much

AND its in a CM400x :'(

Bastard! :cry:

EDIT: Surely you need the same amount of ram per processor? I thought that's why each processor has mem banks by it - so each can access its own ram banks cause of the onchip controller?

[TiG]

Sadly no, i was planning on running 1GB per processor, but if i do that i only get 64bit memory interleaving, rather than the full 128bit memory interleaving, so sadly for the moment its going to have to get access to the memory through the hypertransport pipe...

TiG

[Merlin]

that is one hell of a rig! what are you planning on doing with it? Is there anything out there that can actually make it break into a sweat?

[[GSV]Trig]

Does it play minesweeper?

Serious bit of kit that, me wants, I'll add it to my list

[TiG]

Originally posted by Merlin
that is one hell of a rig! what are you planning on doing with it? Is there anything out there that can actually make it break into a sweat?

Its going to be running a temporal DB. I.e completely inpendant of time so Management can watch progress of some sales etc here.

The processing every morning of a 2GB database stresses it out, but its not got too far through the system development life cycle yet.

TiG

[Jiff Lemon]

Damn fine case - how much including the rack kit?
And which model raid card is it?

[TiG]

Adaptec 2410SA SATA Raid Controller 4 Channel is the raid controller card.

The case cost £242 inc vat, I've not got the rails yet, as its a fair few weeks months away from going into the live system...

TiG

[Stoo]

*Whistles*
That's very, very, nice.. It'd make a good IL2FB dedicated server..