Elliot Posted February 14, 2009 Share Posted February 14, 2009 (edited) I am starting to read that the XEON 5500 motherboards from Tyan and Supermicro are about to be launched. Question.... is this new XEON 5500 or the 5580 as good as they claim it is going to be...? Is the Opteron equivalent going to be as good....? This last week I had a Supermicro motherboard died on me. This is the second motherboard in 10 plus years that has died at my place. A strange coincidense that the first one, 10 years ago was another Supermicro. My Tyan motherboards are still working OK. Supermicron people are very good and responsive. The board is still under warranty and they have issues a return authorization. Second question..... all my workstations have Raid SCCI's at 15,000rpm Seagates. On the last motherboard I put two SATA Western Digitals at 10,000 rpm. I really don't notice the difference between the SATA's and the SCCI's in spite of seeing a difference with the benchmarking software. Is this my imagination..... do these technologies have the same throughput....? Does anybody has experience with these solid state hardrives that claim being so fast.....? Elliot Edited February 14, 2009 by Elliot Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted February 14, 2009 Share Posted February 14, 2009 Are those Gainestown CPUs going to be released soon? If they are I'd hold off and see what their performance is like before buying another platform. I bet the 5580 will be killer expensive though... BTW 2 failed MB's in 10 years when it seems you've got multiple computers there is not a bad failure rate. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Elliot Posted February 14, 2009 Author Share Posted February 14, 2009 Drew I agree with you about the Motherboard failure. It is really like two failures in 15 years. On the 5580 I feel the same way.... They are showing them at 1,600 to 1,800 each. Both Tyan and Supermicro are about to launch their motherboards. On paper they look promising...... Elliot Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Elliot Posted February 15, 2009 Author Share Posted February 15, 2009 Hey Drew What is Skulltrail. I have been reading on another forum about guys that are dreaming to have the Xeon 5580's on a Skulltrail type MB. On the same exotic machines forum they are starting to talk about the new Opteron that will compete with the Xeon 5580's. Do you know anything about these new CPU's. I have two Opetron machines and 1 Xeon. I always thought the Opterons performed better, that was 2 years ago and now it is perhaps a different story. From what I am researching, the power supply has to be a nice one. I am concerned about enviromental noise. Everything here produces heat and noise. At 2 and 3 am I can hear these machines as I enter the office. Even the 1gb switch produces noise. My ideal machine would be noisless. Is there such a cooling device? Elliot Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted February 15, 2009 Share Posted February 15, 2009 Skulltrail is a marketing gimmick from Intel. A while back they declared they were making a dual socket motherboard for Core 2 quad-cores. That sounds like in interesting idea, but it has 2 LGA771 sockets. Core 2 quad chips use LGA775. LGA771 is for Xeons - and they released one model labelled a Core 2 Extreme, for LGA771, that was basically a Xeon with its multiplier unlocked. So you get a dual Xeon you can overclock, which sounds cool except that is so absurdly expensive you'd have to be one of those guys who's 27-45, makes six figures as a programmer, owns more than 500 DVDs of Japanese anime, and brings his desktop computer to parties to actually buy one. Or be a high school freshman with rich parents. I haven't read of any plans for Intel to release such a platform for i7, and if there's anybody on web forums hoping they do or making plans to eventually buy one they almost certainly fall into the above two categories. These people aren't buying these computers to get work done. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted February 15, 2009 Share Posted February 15, 2009 As for the rest, I'm not familiar with these Opterons but it would nice to have competition return to that sector, and you'll need to do your own research on quiet power supplies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Elliot Posted February 16, 2009 Author Share Posted February 16, 2009 Drew I just read your posting. I was out most of the day. Very interesting on the Skulltrail. On some of the geek's forums they are talking about these MB's. Three years ago the gamer geeks posted all kind of benchmarking results about the Opteron's. That prompted me to try them out. Since then I have done two MB's using these Opterons. At that time the Opterons where supposed to be faster than the equivalent Xeon's. My two workstations are now 2.5 and 2 years old and they are still fast enough for what I do. The faster one is the MB that just failed and the one I want to replace ASAP. Supermicro is sending to me a replacement motherboard, but I know it is time to do two new boxes. The super geeks have some cooling systems that are supposed to be very quiet. I want to research about these systems. The noise here is a low frequency hum that gets on my nerves. Hi hi hi Thanks Elliot Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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