[geeks] Athlon Motherboards

[Will Mc Donald]

From: <vance at neurotica.com>
> > On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Will Mc Donald wrote:
> > Tyan do MP boards that satisfy both your requirements IIRC.
> >
> > http://www.tyan.com/products/html/athlon.html
> >
> > The Tiger MPX does have an onboard NIC but no video or SCSI. The Thunder
> > boards both come with integrated NICs and SCSI (U320 on the Pro model).
>
> These would be fine for me, except that they don't support AGP 8X.  My
> next question is: Does that matter?  (This is a gaming box I'm upgrading.)

For a gaming machine SMP's really not that useful, id (Doom, Quake etc.) are
pretty much the only developers that provide support for multiple processors.
And I'd imagine 8x AGP would be quite relevant for a gaming box.

> The other thing is that I'm slightly leaning towards an Opteron
> motherboard, and Tyan doesn't have an Opteron motherboard that has both
> AGP and SCSI.  I guess they think that only servers need SCSI, but I won't
> use IDE for anything except maybe for laptops.

There's a Reg. article [1] on a PC builder already gearing up for Opteron
gaming kit. They're using one of these Asus boards [2] and personally I quite
like Asus motherboards.

An Opteron or a P4 board with a Radeon 9800 Pro would probably be what I'd go
for now, finances permitting. And you can always add SCSI yourself. And some
of the more recent SATA drives have been getting reasonable reviews see [3].

Will.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/32455.html

[2] http://www.asus.com/products/mb/socket940/sk8n/overview.htm

[3] http://www.storagereview.com