Tyan K8SRE S2891
The
Tyan K8SRE is the latest server based Opteron board from a well-known motherboard manufacturer, Tyan. The K8SRE features Nvidia's nForce
TM Professional 2200 core logic solution. For more information on the nForce Professional chipset, check out Derek Wilson's
excellent coverage.
Overall, the Tyan board performed well in our tests. We did, however, have some compatibility issues with our Crucial memory on this board. Some minor BIOS tweaks managed to get us up and running, and stable. We'd recommend that you adhere to memory that is officially supported by Tyan to avoid any compatibility issues - our memory was not on the recommended list.
1Ghz HyperTransport Support
According to AMD, the 252 supports a 1GHz HyperTransport bus frequency. The Tyan board sets the HyperTransport bus frequency automatically to 800MHz, which is what we used for our tests. We did, however, manually forced the HyperTransport frequency to 1GHz using nVidia's nTune and there was no difference in performance in any of our tests.
Test Software Configuration
Windows 2003 was configured with /3GB and /PAE switches in the boot.ini to support the 8GB of memory used for our tests. SQL Server Enterprise was set to use AWE extensions and a maximum memory limit was set at 6144MB.
Test hardware configuration
Intel Xeon System
3.6 GHz Nocona 1MB L2
3.6 GHz Nocona 2MB L2
Intel SE7620AF2 Motherboard
8GB Crucial PC2-3200 DDR2 Memory
Windows 2003 Enterprise Server (32 Bit)
8 x 36GB 15,000RPM Ultra320 SCSI drives in RAID-0
LSI Logic 320-2 SCSI Raid Controller
AMD Configuration
Opteron 250
Opteron 252
Tyan K8SRE S2891 Motherboard
8GB Crucial DDR-3200 Memory
Windows 2003 Enterprise Server (32 Bit)
8 x 36GB 15,000RPM Ultra320 SCSI drives in RAID-0
LSI Logic 320-2 SCSI Raid Controller
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Jason Clark - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
bthomas, read page 1 please. We focus on the window side of the house and there is no released 64bit OS or SQL server yet.Quanticles, the only measure we has was ntune which reported the HT bus running at 1GHz. Dual configuration for all tests.
Quanticles - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
Did you check to make sure the HT bus was actually running at 1 GHz with an o-scope?Where you running these systems as 1P or 2P? I got the impression that you were running the tests as 1P systems and then was making recommendations on 2P systems.
bthomas - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
Geez. Nobody is mentioning the fact that the Opteron is running on a 32-bit OS in these tests.Yeah, its basically a wash under these conditions, but so what..the real test would be under 64 bit. DB applications/servers are supposed to really thrive in the 64-bit realm. Why didnt you test under a 64 bit OS/DB software like Linux/Postgres|MySQL/etc ?!?
=b.t.
rivieracadman - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
I forgot to ask; Does the 152 offer SSOI or is it still SOI. From the power ratings I can guess it's still SOI. Just curious ...chucky2 - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
I like how vendors cripple the AMD offerings...sometimes ever so slightly, other times largely. Take a look at the two HP offerings listed out at the end of the article and tell me which one you'd like to buy? For $900 extra, I'll give up whatever performance benefit I'd see for the managability any day.Not AMD's fault...it's the vendors... :(
Chuck
Fluff - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
Was NUMA enabled on 2003 Enterprise Edition for the 252?Did it make any difference?
This was not made clear in the article.
Unless /PAE is the equivalent.
mlittl3 - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
For those of you who are interested in what opterons will be made using 90 nm and 1 GHz hypertransport, here is the link on amd's website.http://www2.amd.com/us-en/OPN_Printer/1,,,00.html?...
Sorry it is so long but there is a lot of scripting for filtering results on the page.
To summarize, Opterons 242 (1.6 GHz) to 852 (2.6 GHz) are being updated to the new die process and HT bus.
I would like to recommend to the author of the article to include a reference section at the end of every review to relevant websites for more information. This would be similar to the reference section in the article from Johan. The above link should go there as well as any links to more indepth architecture info on both AMD's and Intel's websites. Just a thought.
skiboysteve - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
that extra period at the end of post #28 made what would have been a normal statement entirely creepy as hell...snorre - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
It would be more interesting with an update to these articles:http://anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=1982
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1935
"The true test that remains, however, is a test comparing AMD’s Opteron to Intel’s Itanium 2. Intel was not very receptive to the idea of doing a head-to-head; not out of a fear of losing, but out of a desire not to lend AMD any credibility by showing that the Opteron is indeed a competitor to the Itanium 2. While we do believe that the Itanium 2 in its 128-way configurations is definitely out of the Opteron’s league, in the 2-way and 4-way configurations that we are interested in comparing, the two are absolutely competitors.
Whether Intel is looking to supply us with an Itanium 2 system or not, we will make that comparison."
We're still waiting...
SpaceRanger - Monday, February 14, 2005 - link
I'd love to see it Jason..