Looking for the "cadillac" of AMD Opteron compatible motherboards

Hello - I am a relative newbie in the area of bulding machines. Most of my experience has been with "snapping together" components of OEM machines. (heavy into IBM)

Now, I am out on a mission - I want to build SERIOUS server class workstations. I'm not too proud to admit - I've made some very expensive mistakes, and I'm ready to start doing things the right way.

So, to start off, I have 2 AMD opteron 254 processors. I don't know much about "chipsets" and "stepping", and things of the sort, so I'd like to ask for some nice, easy to digest references to this. (Googling has gotten overwhelming, and not always helpful) Second, I'd like to know who makes the "best of class" when it comes to motherboards. I see certain names tossed around a lot, like Tyan and Asus - but is it because of their worthiness, or because they are "economy" models?

I have other questions about motherboards, like why do some of the AMD Opteron boards that I am seeing have a FSB? I understood that AMD Opteron processors do not use a front side bus, but access memory directly. (direct connect architecture) Can someone explain this?

I will also be looking for a good chassis. I know this isn't the proper forum, but maybe we can lump it in. Again, looking for the "best of the best" type stuff, because this will be used for our business.

We are building machines for high end CAD and extreme graphics applications. (not games)

Thank you to all who take the time to respond to this overwhelming request. As it is, there just isn't anymore time in a day to read the numerous forums and reviews to try to arrive at a roundabout answer. (there is almost TOO MUCH information)

as for where to look, TYAN, IWILL, and SuperMicro all make some good workstation boards, ASUS makes a few too but they are bigger in the gamer market, i personally would get a socket F board instead of socket 940 as you get to use DDR2 RAM but it needs a 2000 series cpu so its a no go if you already have the CPU

the chipset is just the chips on the board, it basically means what drivers you get to use for most of your stuff, i prefer ones made by nVidia

the stepping of the CPU has to deal how long it takes the CPU to complete an instruction, basically the smaller the better, but a high number allows for a higher clock rate, and a high clock rate is also faster, this is one of the big reasons why a P4 has a high clock but is slower then an AMD

as for the FSB, well often the speed of the Hypertransport on AMD systems is called the FSB, I'm not sure if its technically accurate to do that but that is what the number refers to

and for a case, well newegg has a lot, the ones you would like are probably going to be in the server section of their site, but many of the big gamer cases are designed to take a big board and you shouldn't eliminate them for a choice for a workstation, just don't use an included power supply in those cases, they are usually less then spectacular

BTW, i recommend doing plenty of searches on newegg, they have a lot of good server/workstation stuff, their selection of server motherboards/CPUs are a little small IMO, but they have some high end drives including SCSI/SAS drives at 10K/15K rpm which i strongly recommend for a workstation, add in a nice RAID card too

I don't know what you mean by a socket F, but I'll check into that. I already have my CPU, so it really is a done deal.

It has been suggested to me by some acquaintances that SuperMicro is the way to go for high end server boards. Concurrence?



I have 2 options in chipset for the processors that I have. One option is AMD-8131, and the other is the nNvidia nForce Pro 2200. Impressive sounding name, but I still don't know what to make of it.



My understanding, based on the description of the "non-FSB" issue, as explained on the AMD website, is that the direct connect architecture allows the CPU to access the memory at clock speed. So I'm missing something...



I've done a lot of searches there, and will undoubtedly do many more. I've got plenty of drives, memory, and RAID controllers, so the big job is down to the motherboard.

Thanks for the advice.

its the newest socket from AMD, its pretty much just adds support for DDR2 RAM, and its generally faster



i would just search by price/specs and see what reviews you find on then, i don't really have enough knowledge to know what brands are best, but i know that all the companies i listed make many workstation and server class boards and they all major manufacturers for that type of board




as for what they mean, those chips are the ones that determine how many PCIe Lanes there are on the board, it determines what processor and how can be supported, and some standard features (like some onboard sound/network cards), it determines what many of the features of the board really are, the board manufacturer then has the ability to implement many of these features how they would like (some may use the PCIe for 2 16x slots, while others may only offer 2 8x PCI slots, 1 4x PCIe, and an onboard RAID card), generally the chipset is something that is only a small part of your decision when looking at a boards specs, to the consumer it only really affects you because of the drivers you will use and the reputation of the company that makes the chip, all the important features of the chipset are listed as a feature of the board (the SATA, PCI/PCI-X/PCIe, IDE/network are often features of the chipset), the chipset is such an integral part of the motherboard a huge amount of the specs of the motherboard are really the specs of the chipset




an AMD processor has HyperTransport and an on-die memory controller, when it needs to access byte ABC it sends the request at clock speed to the memory controller which then converts it into the proper RAM signals, that is sent through the socket directly to the RAM, an Intel CPU sends the request at FSB speed to the chipset which generates the RAM signal, this means an AMD CPU has a separate bank of RAM for every CPU which means it scales very well, where an Intel CPU has one bank for all CPUs and it sends its RAM data over the FSB taking up bandwidth

an AMD CPU also has HyperTransport, this is a point-to-point bus and is often referred to as the FSB (though i don't know if its correct to say that, it definitely is done), because its point-to-point many things can use the bus at the same time without fighting for bandwidth, where an Intel CPU has a shared FSB, when something uses it then everything else has to listen, this means devices connected to the bus will fight for bandwidth

the new woodcrest/conroe CPUs have a memory architecture that is very good at guessing what data will be needed from the RAM can can presumptively retrieve it, this can compensate for the extreme low latency that the AMD CPUs have compared to the Intel

AMD processors do scale much much better then an Intel processor, the new Intel CPUs can kill the FX-62, but in a dual-dual core setup the AMDs are about the same speed as the woodcrest, when you get to an 8-way or 4-way server an AMD system is much faster than an Intel system