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| AMD's Quad FX Platform What's in a 4x4? | |
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(Author: MS, January 21, 2007) |
The Motherboard
One of the few universally accepted rules in the semiconductor industry is that nobody wants to deal with a single source supplier. In the case of the L1 platform, however, there are not too many choices for who even could make a decent motherboard and as a result, ASUS is the only current manufacturer for this platform. We have always been huge fans of ASUS but a lack of competition invites slack and it is not good for the prices either. The current msrp for the L1N64-SLI hovers around US$ 350.-, a somewhat hefty chunk of change just to get started. Needless to say that the equity in form of hardware is probably worth it, featuring a dual chipset (on one package), 6 SATA ports configurable for nVRAID, 10 USB ports, dual Ethernet controllers with integrated MACs, capable of running nVidia's traffic priorization technology a.k.a. First Packet etc., etc. The fact that there are two 16 x PCIe connectors for SLI and overall support for up to four graphics cards, along with Secure Virtual Machine capabilities and legacy PCI support becomes almost negligible by assimilation compared to the other goodies, especially the 1207 land grid array and the interleaved access of up to eight ranks of memory - positioned smack in the middle between the two CPUs.
Another gripe we have with the motherboard is that, as so often in the past, some BIOS settings are not what they claim to be - or else, they are not exactly functional. One example is the NUMA support, where the settings are reversed, that is, in order to enable it, it is necessary to set it to "Disabled". Even then, NUMA only works in a 64-bit OS environment. To be true, WindowsXP only added NUMA support trough SP2 but at least on the K8N-DL it appears to work just fine even in Windows XP-32. A similar situation is apparent for Cool'N Quiet. Whereas C'nQ works just fine on the K8N-DL (after the gazillionth BIOS update that is) getting it to work on the L1N64-SLI was not possible with the drivers posted on AMD's website - as long as we were running in WindowsXP (SP2). Curiously, however, after installing the 64-bit edition of Windows Vista, both NUMA and C'nQ were working flawlessly. As it turns out, though, AMD has special drivers for the "Socket F" processors that will enable C'nQ, meaning that this is not an issue with the motherboard itself or the BIOS but a simple driver issue.
Update: It turns out that there was some miscommunication along with a glitch in the WindowsXP 32 Power Options configuration that prevented CnQ from running correctly. After retesting everything with:
With respect to NUMA, we can blame it on the BIOS or the OS but in reality it may be an interaction between the two. As mentioned, it took a bunch of BIOS revisions until the K8N-DL was working correctly, so there is some hope. On the other hand, some of the memory settings had no effect on performance either - 1T CMD Rate or 2T, even in SiSoft Sandra, the numbers came out identical within the margins of error. Of course, this begs the question why not run in Vista-64 to begin with? One of the answers is that there are still no drivers, for example for SLI or nVRAID just to mention a few issues, and most applications still dont take advantage of 64-bit either. In other words, at this point it really comes down to chosing the best of two worlds where neither one is really a completely satisfactory option. Essentially, there is still a humongous amount of ground to be covered and all we can hope for is some new BIOS revisions that weed out the current bugs. Along the same lines, ASUS website deserves the silver lemon for lack of accessibility of drivers and utilities, a simple 3 MB download of the correct CPU drivers timed out repeatedly and consistently after approximately 4 hours of estimated 55 hours total download time.
The dual processor VRMs used on the L1N64-SLI are based on the AnalogDevices ADP3186 5-bit programmable synchronous buck controller. The original release of this controller goes back to mid 2004, and the circuitry may be just a bit beyond its prime time.
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