Opteron's with dual cores

[Zak33]

Can someone explain the benefits and pitfalls of the 165's and 170's?

What mobo's?

DO you need double ram to allow each their own space?

What's the score guys.....I'm well interested now

[Lee H]

The 165 and 170 series ( for socket 939 ) work on the majority of motherboards which are out there on the market, but some might require a BIOS update to 100% support the processors.

In regards to the memory, the 2 cores utilise the same "memory controller" thats embedded in the CPU and they also use the hypertransport system meaning that you do not require say 1 Gb of memory per "core"

As they say - a picture paints a thousand words so here goes - hopefully these pictures will make it easier to understand

Single Core Architecture ;
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/cont...r_diag_280.jpg

Dual Core Architecture ;
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/cont...e_diag_280.jpg

Anyway, you should have 2 Gb for gaming nowadays

I've just glossed over the topic so you can get a little knowledge but I expect someone would be along later with a huge thesis on opterons, performance etc ( cue... platinum aka platin00b )

[Clunk]

the only pitfall really with a dual opty is the heat thats generated when you add some extra voltage. im guessing that you are intending to overclock, but do be aware that not all optys will do silly high mhz on stock volts. my current 165 is good for 2600mhz but it needs 1.53v to do it. on air cooling this meant that my idle temps were 35/36c and load was going to upper 50's. that was in a case with good airflow and using a thermalright si-120 heatsink. also the pwmic area will need a fan blowing over it as it will get hot under load. just a low rpm fan will do the trick there.

edit* added watercooling and temps are fine now

some good points.

previously on my 3200 venice @ 2600, i could encode a 8 gig dvd using dvdrb + cce in around 3.5 hours but the system wasnt useable for much else. with this opty i can do it in 2 hours and the pc is fully useable for other things.

not much bogs the system down at all now, itll definately be dependant on what you use it for, but ive seen some spectacular results.


theres probably more but i cant think at the moment

[Zak33]

how does the PC decide which Core to use? Is it an icon on the task bar or what? Does it all do it for you? Could I run a Teamspeak Server on one, and play on the other?

[Clunk]

you can manually set the affinity for each program in the task manager, but to be honest i find it best to just let it do its own thing. im sure others will have their own take on this.

i think (only think) that you could do your server / game thing like this, but i may be wrong.

in the properties of the desktop icon for your server, set it to something like

"C:\Program Files\serverblah\serverblah.exe" -A0

and for the game

"C:\Program Files\gameblah\gameblah.exe" -A1

maybe someone else could confirm this is correct?

[Agent]

previously on my 3200 venice @ 2600, i could encode a 8 gig dvd using dvdrb + cce in around 3.5 hours but the system wasnt useable for much else. with this opty i can do it in 2 hours and the pc is fully useable for other things

How many passes ?

[Clunk]

4 passes mate

[kempez]

TBH the Task manager does it all for you on the load balancing side of things. Its actually very good at it too imo

Only thing I manually set priority for is Prime95 whilst testing my overclocks

Zek - you won't be dissapointed with a dual core CPU mate. They are speedy as anything in windows and if you use a lot of stuff at once then you can tell the difference no problems

[Agent]

4 passes mate

Ive recently had a 3 gighz opty thats been doing nothing, so ive left it doing 10 passes of a few things

[Clunk]

well if its doing nothing then i spose it wont do any harm, but i cant see any difference from 4, 6, 8 on my telly