“Robert Agustin” <agustin@apicom.com> wrote in message
news:3CBC5E0A.9060607@apicom.com…
Have a little more information now, as well as some things to watch out
for when building a dual-processor machine with the Tyan Thunder K7. If
you’re using this motherboard, you need to be aware of a few things:
The TigerMP or MPX which doesn`t have these “limitation”
The K7 or K7X is really mean for more beefy server.
-
The power supply required is NOT a standard ATX power supply. It is
an ATX-GES powersupply which has slightly different power connectors. I
ended up getting the NMB 460 Watt power supply (don’t know exact model
number, but it was labelled specifically for “Dual AMD motherboard”.
-
The case you get must be big enough for this motherboard. I got the
enermax FS-710 case and replaced the power supply with the compatible one.
-
The heatsinks you get must be fairly small. I got ones from Alpha
first and they were waaay to big. Then I got ThermalRight SK-6’s and
they fit pretty well but are really noisy. Going to have to replace
those fans later… > 
-
The memory required is NOT your standard unbuffered DDR-SDRAM. You
need to make sure you get “registered” DDR-SDRAM or else you’ll get
weird memory errors at boot time up the wazoo. I’m going to run and
pick up some of this memory in a few hours.
I was able to get QNX hobbling on it with one stick of 256MB of
unbuffered DDR-SDRAM installed, but it wasn’t too pretty. Hopefully it
all runs when I drop the new memory in place…
-Robert
Hmm.. was originally going to go with the TigerMP/MPX, but then I got
enough of a budget to get the Thunder. Little did I know that it
came with a lot of caveats and gotchas… 
Here’s more random notes if anyone’s interested:
-
Did a quick SMP kernal build with the default SMP kernel build script.
Worked like a charm. Having two processor load bars instead of just
one in photon is pretty cool.
-
It seems stable and actually quite nice now with one stick of 512MB
ECC Registered PC2100 DDR-SDRAM (from Corsair). Have another 512 on the
way.
-
Performance is fastest I’ve seen compared to other configurations I’ve
tried. Compile time of my project’s source tree with gcc is still over
an hour though…
-
The ThermalRight heatsink fans are NOISY! I’m looking into
replacement fans before I go either deaf or insane.
-
The Thunder’s onboard ATI Rage video chipset seems to work well with
QNX, no need to run out and get a special video card.
-
Haven’t tried onboard ethernet yet, I stuck in a 3Com 3c905B-TX just
so that I wouldn’t have to reconfigure my dhcp/name service for the
machine (yup, I’m lame…)
-
Only problem so far I’ve noticed is that the motherboard occasionally
seems to “forget” it has two processors after rebooting, especially
after twiddling with the bios. Turning off the comnputer, then turning
it back on seems to fix that problem. Wondering if it’s bug in bios…
Well, that’s about it for now. We’ll see how things look after a few weeks.
-Robert
Mario Charest wrote:
“Robert Agustin” <> agustin@apicom.com> > wrote in message
news:> 3CBC5E0A.9060607@apicom.com> …
Have a little more information now, as well as some things to watch out
for when building a dual-processor machine with the Tyan Thunder K7. If
you’re using this motherboard, you need to be aware of a few things:
The TigerMP or MPX which doesn`t have these “limitation”
The K7 or K7X is really mean for more beefy server.
\
-
The power supply required is NOT a standard ATX power supply. It is
an ATX-GES powersupply which has slightly different power connectors. I
ended up getting the NMB 460 Watt power supply (don’t know exact model
number, but it was labelled specifically for “Dual AMD motherboard”.
-
The case you get must be big enough for this motherboard. I got the
enermax FS-710 case and replaced the power supply with the compatible one.
-
The heatsinks you get must be fairly small. I got ones from Alpha
first and they were waaay to big. Then I got ThermalRight SK-6’s and
they fit pretty well but are really noisy. Going to have to replace
those fans later… >
-
The memory required is NOT your standard unbuffered DDR-SDRAM. You
need to make sure you get “registered” DDR-SDRAM or else you’ll get
weird memory errors at boot time up the wazoo. I’m going to run and
pick up some of this memory in a few hours.
I was able to get QNX hobbling on it with one stick of 256MB of
unbuffered DDR-SDRAM installed, but it wasn’t too pretty. Hopefully it
all runs when I drop the new memory in place…
-Robert
\
“Robert Agustin” <agustin@apicom.com> wrote in message
news:3CBCC33A.7080408@apicom.com…
Hmm.. was originally going to go with the TigerMP/MPX, but then I got
enough of a budget to get the Thunder. > > Little did I know that it
came with a lot of caveats and gotchas… >
Here’s more random notes if anyone’s interested:
-
Did a quick SMP kernal build with the default SMP kernel build script.
Worked like a charm. Having two processor load bars instead of just
one in photon is pretty cool. >
-
It seems stable and actually quite nice now with one stick of 512MB
ECC Registered PC2100 DDR-SDRAM (from Corsair). Have another 512 on the
way.
-
Performance is fastest I’ve seen compared to other configurations I’ve
tried. Compile time of my project’s source tree with gcc is still over
an hour though…
Try make -j2, this will tell make to run two compilations at the same time
(if the rules allow it). In my case this keeps both CPU 100% busy!
- The ThermalRight heatsink fans are NOISY! I’m looking into
replacement fans before I go either deaf or insane.
Yeah that’s a downside of AMD cpu, there run HOT. I have the “old” Athlon
(not the XP) that I overclock and it dissipates close to 100Watt ;-(
-
The Thunder’s onboard ATI Rage video chipset seems to work well with
QNX, no need to run out and get a special video card.
-
Haven’t tried onboard ethernet yet, I stuck in a 3Com 3c905B-TX just
so that I wouldn’t have to reconfigure my dhcp/name service for the
machine (yup, I’m lame…)
-
Only problem so far I’ve noticed is that the motherboard occasionally
seems to “forget” it has two processors after rebooting, especially
after twiddling with the bios. Turning off the comnputer, then turning
it back on seems to fix that problem. Wondering if it’s bug in bios…
There has been quite a few bios upgrade for these MB.
Well, that’s about it for now. We’ll see how things look after a few
weeks.
-Robert
Mario Charest wrote:
“Robert Agustin” <> agustin@apicom.com> > wrote in message
news:> 3CBC5E0A.9060607@apicom.com> …
Have a little more information now, as well as some things to watch out
for when building a dual-processor machine with the Tyan Thunder K7. If
you’re using this motherboard, you need to be aware of a few things:
The TigerMP or MPX which doesn`t have these “limitation”
The K7 or K7X is really mean for more beefy server.
\
-
The power supply required is NOT a standard ATX power supply. It is
an ATX-GES powersupply which has slightly different power connectors. I
ended up getting the NMB 460 Watt power supply (don’t know exact model
number, but it was labelled specifically for “Dual AMD motherboard”.
-
The case you get must be big enough for this motherboard. I got the
enermax FS-710 case and replaced the power supply with the compatible
one.
-
The heatsinks you get must be fairly small. I got ones from Alpha
first and they were waaay to big. Then I got ThermalRight SK-6’s and
they fit pretty well but are really noisy. Going to have to replace
those fans later… >
-
The memory required is NOT your standard unbuffered DDR-SDRAM. You
need to make sure you get “registered” DDR-SDRAM or else you’ll get
weird memory errors at boot time up the wazoo. I’m going to run and
pick up some of this memory in a few hours.
I was able to get QNX hobbling on it with one stick of 256MB of
unbuffered DDR-SDRAM installed, but it wasn’t too pretty. Hopefully it
all runs when I drop the new memory in place…
-Robert
\