Tyan AMD Dual-processor motherboard

[robm]

I just picked one of these things up for $5, anyone have any experience with it?

http://www.tyan.com/archive/products/ht ... erk7x.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

4gb maximum RAM, onboard SCSI, Athlon MP processor support, two 64 bit PCI slots, 8x AGP slot, and... extremely large.

I'm not overly impressed with the maximum speed of the MP processors (then again, I've always hated AMD, so I'm not that well versed in AMD hardware anyway,) but two 1.7 ghz processors can't be all bad. I understand this is more of a server-oriented motherboard, but I wanted to know if anyone can vouch for its performance.

[MegatronUK]

Athlon MP processors went up the 2800+ (Athlons of this era used the '+' notation and the 2800+ was was available in two versions: a 2.0GHz with more, faster cache and another slightly slower one which ran at 2.2GHz core speed). I've got a similar board from Gigabyte (7DPXPW+) that I've owned since new (approx 2003) running two MP 2800 processors, 4GB of ram, a 64bit Broadcom network card and a 64bit 3Ware RAID card (in a case stuffed full of 12 x 500GB SATA drives).

They've got more than enough horsepower to still serve as beefy file storage systems (I get several hundred megabytes a second out of my disk array and the system is fast enough to easily sustain 60-70Mbytes/sec over gigabit ethernet) and way more oomph than you need for a personal web server.

Don't think it will make a good gaming system though.

[MegatronUK]

To sum up, with server board like that (and newer ones) you're paying for a stable, well tested design that can run 24/7 without any problems and a fast IO and disk subsystem with lots of bandwidth - hence the 64bit PCI slots on such designs.

The same with the MP processors - they're designed, tested and warrented for server environments (Opteron wasn't available back then) so were never available at the higher speeds that the desktop equivalents were. Same with the Opteron/AMD X2 and Xeon/C2Q/i7 today; the desktops always get the faster speeds first, until the designs are well proven and tested.

[robm]

Hmm, duly noted.

Any particular issue you can think of that would make it a bad gaming rig? I have zero experience with server-based systems, so I'm not real well versed.

[samjc3]

Hmm, duly noted.

Any particular issue you can think of that would make it a bad gaming rig? I have zero experience with server-based systems, so I'm not real well versed.

so far as i know, there is no video card, nor are there slots for video cards.

[robm]

Actually, it has an AGP pro slot, capable of running 4x or 8x cards, and also has some sort of variant of a Rage on-board chipset.

[vskid]

Hmm, duly noted.

Any particular issue you can think of that would make it a bad gaming rig? I have zero experience with server-based systems, so I'm not real well versed.

so far as i know, there is no video card, nor are there slots for video cards.

So what is the Accelerated Graphics Port used for? If you looked at the specs, its has crappy onboard graphics and an AGP slot.
Athlon CPUs were pretty fast compared to Intel's offerings of the time. Wasn't until dual core stuff started coming out that AMD dropped the ball. With a decent video card, it should make an ok gaming rig. But if it'll cost more than ~$200, you might want to consider just using newer hardware.

[robm]

Heh, ok, well, I"ll go ahead and give this a shot. I've always wanted a dual-processor machine for the novelty, so I suppose this shall be my chance.

I've got a bid on eBay for a lot of two MP processors, going for about 44 bucks now:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0051704461" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Once those are in, I'll start looking at fans for them, and a graphics card. I only have a crap 128 meg nVidia card at the moment. In the interim I'll start replacing the capacitor that was accidentally broken off (hence the $5 pick-up,) and working on finding a suitable case. It's a monster board.

[MegatronUK]

Yep, you've got AGP for a graphics card, but you're severely limited in terms of memory bandwidth; as far as I'm aware the AMD 760 multi-processor chipset does not support dual channel, so you're stuck with 266MHz single channel ram. I believe they only support USB 1.1 as well.

It'll run stuff up to ~2005/2006 ok, but it will struggle on newer things. at least mine, with twin 2800+ cpus, 4gig and a Nvidia FX5600 at the time did.

[robm]

Yeah, I was concerned about that too.

But, after I'm done, it HAS to be better than this 2.4 Celeron machine I'm running now that does not have an AGP or PCIe slot at all, and therefore forced to get a decent PCI video card and max the board's RAM to 1gb if I actually wanted to "upgrade" this system.

We shall see; I'll have some need for a minor server later on anyway.

Thanks for the input!

[MegatronUK]

No problem. It should still make a good general purpose workhorse machine - and Linux will fly on it, if you decide to use it at a web server, media streamer or storage server in the future.