MSI K8T800 Workstation Review
Omega65
Philadelphia, Pa
<a href="http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2003q3/workstation/index.x?pg=1" target=_blank>Techreport</a> takes the VIA K8T800 based <b>MSI K8T Master2-FAR</b> (MS-9130) Dual Opteron Motherboard, <b>Asus SK8N</b> NF3 Pro & 2 Opteron 240s and compares them to a Dual Xeon 2.66ghz computer with a P4 3.2C and Athlon 3200+ thrown in for good measure.
(Opteron 140/240/840 ~ 2600+)
<a href="http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2003q3/workstation/index.x?pg=1" target=_blank>Read the review here</a>
(Opteron 140/240/840 ~ 2600+)
<a href="http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2003q3/workstation/index.x?pg=1" target=_blank>Read the review here</a>
(excerpt from page4)
The MSI 9130's talents are considerable, but MSI chose a peculiar cost-saving measure in designing this board. Although the 9130 has dual Opteron processors, each with its own dual-channel DDR memory controller, MSI connected only one of the two CPUs to DIMM slots. The second CPU has no local memory, just as indicated in the diagram above. This is not a typical arrangement for multiprocessor Opteron systems, and VIA says the K8T800 works fine with multiple processors using multiple memory controllers. The MSI 9130's performance isn't bad, as you'll see soon, but it has half the memory bandwidth of optimal dual-Opteron configurations, and the system's second processor must always resort to non-local memory access. What's more, the 9130's multiprocessor config offers less redundancy. If CPU 0 fails, CPU 1 cannot access memory, and the system croaks. And last but not least, you'll need to use 2GB DIMMs if you want to reach the 9130's max of 8GB RAM, because it has only 4 DIMM slots.
The 9130 does have another leg up over its nForce3 Pro competition, though, thanks to VIA's Hyper8 technology. Hyper8 is a complete implementation of the fastest link afforded by the HyperTransport spec. On the K8T800, the HyperTransport connection between the north bridge and the primary processor is 16 bits wide in each direction and runs at 800MHz, yielding 6.4GB/s of bandwidth. NVIDIA's solution, by contrast, has only 3.6GB/s of peak bandwidth between the CPU and the nForce3 Pro chip.
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