[geeks] Athlon Motherboards

[vance at neurotica.com]

On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Will Mc Donald wrote:

> > 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.

I never actually mentioned SMP, but this box does serve other purposes for
which SMP would be useful.  I do quite a lot of multimedia stuff with it.
And the utilities I use are multithreaded.

> > 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.

I've used Asus in the past, and I liked them.  I really wish Supermicro
made AMD motherboards.  I *really* like their stuff.  I'm running a Supero
P6SBU right now in that machine, in fact.

> 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].

I was thinking of using a 3DLabs Wildcat4 7210 + Hauppauge WinTV-HD or an
ATI All-in-Wonder 9800 PRO.

Peace...  Sridhar

> [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
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