Tyan K8SRE S2891
The
Tyan K8SRE is the latest server based Opteron board from a well-known motherboard manufacturer, Tyan. The K8SRE features Nvidia's nForce
TM Professional 2200 core logic solution. For more information on the nForce Professional chipset, check out Derek Wilson's
excellent coverage.
Overall, the Tyan board performed well in our tests. We did, however, have some compatibility issues with our Crucial memory on this board. Some minor BIOS tweaks managed to get us up and running, and stable. We'd recommend that you adhere to memory that is officially supported by Tyan to avoid any compatibility issues - our memory was not on the recommended list.
1Ghz HyperTransport Support
According to AMD, the 252 supports a 1GHz HyperTransport bus frequency. The Tyan board sets the HyperTransport bus frequency automatically to 800MHz, which is what we used for our tests. We did, however, manually forced the HyperTransport frequency to 1GHz using nVidia's nTune and there was no difference in performance in any of our tests.
Test Software Configuration
Windows 2003 was configured with /3GB and /PAE switches in the boot.ini to support the 8GB of memory used for our tests. SQL Server Enterprise was set to use AWE extensions and a maximum memory limit was set at 6144MB.
Test hardware configuration
Intel Xeon System
3.6 GHz Nocona 1MB L2
3.6 GHz Nocona 2MB L2
Intel SE7620AF2 Motherboard
8GB Crucial PC2-3200 DDR2 Memory
Windows 2003 Enterprise Server (32 Bit)
8 x 36GB 15,000RPM Ultra320 SCSI drives in RAID-0
LSI Logic 320-2 SCSI Raid Controller
AMD Configuration
Opteron 250
Opteron 252
Tyan K8SRE S2891 Motherboard
8GB Crucial DDR-3200 Memory
Windows 2003 Enterprise Server (32 Bit)
8 x 36GB 15,000RPM Ultra320 SCSI drives in RAID-0
LSI Logic 320-2 SCSI Raid Controller
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Visual - Thursday, July 7, 2005 - link
the intel board that you used, you listed it as SE7620AF2. there is no such thing though, so is it a typoed SE7520AF2 or a yet unreleased board?kaka - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
??,OPteron is better than xeon!!Fluff - Thursday, February 17, 2005 - link
But in future it would be handy to touch upon extra features such as differences in remote management, what happens if a cpu fails, if memory fails is there hotswop. As these probably affect a decision as well as performance.I believe that people benefit from the sort of technical analysis and simulated real world that Anandtech does but in addition the other factors such as up-time and manangement would be nice to know.
If a cpu fan / stick of memory fails on a database at the weekend and no one is there to hear the alarm what do the various platforms do?
If a cpu fails on a dual opteron does that mean it loses all the data attached to that cpu? Does the same happen on a xeon? Will a Xeon keep going with just one - chipkill?
I'm not sure if this is outside the scope of Anandtech.
Jason Clark - Thursday, February 17, 2005 - link
Hans, you are correct in that they wouldn't be using non supported memory. But, since the board was pre-production and at the time of testing there were no "recommended' memory modules, we had to go with what we had. Word is our issues were bios related and a new bios should address it.Cheers
Jason Clark - Thursday, February 17, 2005 - link
Hans, fair enough on the next article we'll include it for those curious.Jason Clark - Thursday, February 17, 2005 - link
Viditor, we tested with 8GB of memory using PAE and AWE support in SQL. When 64bit versions of sql and windows 2003 are ready we'll be all over it.Viditor - Thursday, February 17, 2005 - link
BTW, for some Linux spec results, check these out...http://www.pathscale.com/pr_021505.html
Sun Fire V20z server (2xAMD Opteron processor Model 252, SLES9) with PathScale EKOPath Compiler Suite: SPECfp2000 -- 2036, SPECint_rate2000 -- 40.4, SPECfp_rate2000 -- 46.5.
The Sun Fire V40z server with PathScale EKOPath Compiler Suite (4xAMD Opteron processor Model 852, SLES9): SPECint_rate2000 76.7, SPECfp_rate2000 -- 87.1.
The Sun Fire V20z server (2xAMD Opteron processor Model 250, SLES8): SPECfp_rate2000 37.2.
IBM eServer OpenPower 710 (2x1.65 GHz Power5, Linux): SPECfp_rate -- 40.2.
IBM eServer p5 510 (2x1.65 GHz Power5, AIX): SPECint_rate2000 -- 33, SPECfp_rate2000 -- 43.2
Viditor - Thursday, February 17, 2005 - link
Jason...I see you are retesting the HT, but I haven't seen a comment from you about testing 64bit with large memory (>4GB). Is this something you just aren't prepared to do right now?
Cheers...
Viditor - Thursday, February 17, 2005 - link
"I read viditor comment that said as single"Yup...very sorry prd00...my bad!
"Which is why we aren't going to provide information like that, as it isn't relevant to the target audience or the purpose of the article"
Fair call Jason, but as this is a beta bios, it might be an important data point...
sleepless - "Looking at the configuration you show Opteron 250 with a 252. Did you have a problem getting another 252 Opteron for the test?"
They built 2 test platforms, 1 with dual 250s and 1 with dual 252s...or so I assume (after my last mistake I take nothing for granted)...:-)
sleepless1 - Wednesday, February 16, 2005 - link
Looking at the configuration you show Opteron 250 with a 252. Did you have a problem getting another 252 Opteron for the test?