Re: Building new Athlon AMD64 Socket 939 or 940 machine

On Sun, 27 Nov 2005, Cian Hughes wrote:

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> Hey, I'm in no rush on this one, but I'm planning on building a new Athlon 
> AMD64 machine, It's primarily as a voip server and file storage box for home 
> use and will have 8 SATA (possibly SATA-II) drives attached to a RAID 5 card, 
> probably Highpoint (but i'm open on this).
>
> I am wondering, what have people on this list built recently, within these 
> bounds, I'm looking to choose a motherboard with one or two 1000Base-T 
> Ethernet ports (to keep PCI's free for other things, ISDN card, TV Tuner, 
> etc...), if possible what has and hasn't worked, i'm not too worried about 
> onboard HD controllers, etc.
>
> Basically, before I buy I want to avoid any mistakes that people have already 
> hit, I know there is a supported hardware list, but is their an advised 
> hardware list for FreeBSD, especially with regard to RAID Cards and 
> Motherboards.

Hi Cian,

I put together a machine a couple months ago.  I used a Tyan S2875ANRF 
("Tiger K8W") dual-Opteron motherboard and a single Opteron 244 (1.8 GHz) 
cpu (second one may come in the future).  I am running 5.4 and have been 
very happy with it.

I decided it was worth going for Opteron over Athlon 64.  They seem to 
have better performance (wider memory bus, etc), obviously SMP ability, 
and as I understand it the regular Athlon 64s don't support ECC memory 
which I insist upon.  The Athlon 64FX appear to be similar to the fastest 
Opterons and differ mainly for price marketing purposes (sold to gamers).

I had a disk-related panic/crash once, I cannot remember the details.  It 
never recurred.  The board has a SiI 3114 SATA controller, and I believe 
support for SiI is not perfect, so that may be the cause; or the 
dirt-cheap disk.  If you are going to use your own controller then this 
probably has nothing to do with you.  I don't know anything about RAID 
hardware, sorry.

It has an onboard 1000BaseT port with em controller.  This works 
perfectly, though I only use it at 100Mb since I don't have a gigabit 
switch.

There are 5 pci slots and 1 agp.  No vga on board.  I threw in an old junk 
pci vga card because I only use it for text (no X on the box, it's mostly 
headless).  It also has serial ports which could be useful for headless 
operation.  Supposedly the BIOS setup also supports a serial console.

Sound, USB and Firewire are on board.  I have not tried them.

It doesn't support dual-core opteron, if that's something you wanted.

The only other thing that didn't work immediately is the cpu temperature 
sensor (Winbond W83627HF).  There is a hardware bit you have to twiddle to 
enable it, which mbmon doesn't do.  I wrote my own utility to read the 
sensor after reading the datasheet, which of course you are welcome to if 
you wind up with this board.

So I would recommend this board/cpu based on my experience so far.  It's a 
good value for the money.

I hope this is of some value to you.  Let me know if you want to know any 
more.

-- 
Nate Eldredge
nge_at_cs.hmc.edu