Intel Woodcrest, AMD's Opteron and Sun's UltraSparc T1: Server CPU Shoot-out

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• zsdersw - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link

  I'm not saying the board is particularly stellar.. I'm saying that it's referred to by MSI as a "server" product.

• ashyanbhog - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link

  Irespective of what MSI says,
  
  fact is there were better mainstream boards for Anandtech to choose from if a honest, independent review was their intention
  
  

• zsdersw - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link

  I.E., your comment belongs under someone else's.. not mine.

• zsdersw - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link

  And that's completely irrelevant to what I was saying.

• ashyanbhog - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link

  all I was saying is, its nice to see Intel finally making a comeback
  
  but Anandtech seems have conducted a skewed benchmark that favours Intel, that unfairly increases the performance gap between Opteron and Woodcrest
  
  In the final summary of the review he says
  
  "In one word: Woodcrest rocks!"
  
  There are quite a few holes in the review, the motherboard is just on of them,
  
  I quoted MySQL number errors in my posts above,
  
  just search for "ashyanbhog" in the page and read my earlier comments if you are interested.
  
  

• AnandThenMan - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link

  quote:
  

  ---

  And that's completely irrelevant to what I was saying.

  ---

  
  
  What you're saying in general is irrelevant. Intel calls their integrated graphics "high performance" but that doesn't make it so.
  
  MSI calling that a server board is just marketing, it does not represent what a true, high performance server class mobo is all about. Not that it's a bad piece of hardware, it is good for the price to be sure. But it is NOT a server class product.

• zsdersw - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link

  At a certain price point, it could certainly be a nice entry-level server board.
  
  Performance alone isn't what makes a server-class motherboard a server-class motherboard.

• ashyanbhog - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link

  quote:
  

  ---

  Performance alone isn't what makes a server-class motherboard a server-class motherboard.

  ---

  
  
  One of the motherboards used in this review is a cheap piece that trades performance to keep price low.
  
  Why was that motherboard selected over mainstream server/workstation boards that are proven to offer slightly better performance? Why pick a 250$ MSI board for opteron over $500 boards from Tyan, Iwill, Supermicro or others. The Intel Xeon "Inderwale" gets a $500 board, so price could not have been the issue.
  
  So what's the point in using a Single Channel board for this benchmark, when price was not a limitation?
  
  Single memory channel boards like the one from MSI, are known to offer lower performance than dual / dedicated memory channel boards when used in 2P Opteron configurations. Dual Channel boards are the mainstream boards for 2P Opteron systems. There are plently Server boards available in Dual / dedicated memory lane configuration. There are enough reviews on the net to show the performance diff b/w single memory channel boards and dual memory channel boards
  
  The issue is not about the MSI or its class, the issue is why did Anandtech pick a Single memeory channel board instead of a more mainstream dual memory channel board.
  
  Hope that clears up "zsdersw"'s query

• zsdersw - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link

  I'm not making excuses for the choices that were made regarding this comparison test. I'm talking about what constitutes a "server-class" motherboard.

• ashyanbhog - Thursday, June 8, 2006 - link

  Game PC review link for the above comment
  
  http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=tig...">http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=tig...