Athlon 64FX

The tyan mother boards are rock solid. No blue screen or hang ups of any kind so far.

I went with a Gigabyte GA-K8VT800 mb. The chipset in this scored a little faster than the n-forces in the reviews I read.

It's been very good. No lockups except for the occasional SW lockup.

Jay

advantages/disadvantages

I swear by MSI for single workstations but they don't have a dual Opteron with an AGP slot, as the dual Opteron is targeted for server use.

My preference, considering performance, reliability, features, etc. would be:

MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, & Tyan in that order.

Go to

they carry them all.

- Eddy

Oops, I forgot about the dual Opteron MSI "K8T Master2-FAR" at $207 from newegg.com. The reason I passed over this is because it doesn't have any

64bit pci slots which I required for my new dual Opteron server, but it does have AGP8x and all the rest. I would HIGHLY recommend it for a dually workstation, which I may add to the office arsenal later this year. I run MSI all the way :)

- Eddy

advantages/disadvantages

Thanks Eddy,

That board was on my short list.

Regards

Mark

Hi I've just had a twin opteron built on the Tyan Thunder K8W board - seemed to have rave reviews and the guys I use seem to trust those boards for their servers without any complaints - it's essentially a server board with AGP support (no USB2 though - weird!). I haven't set it up yet with solidworks, but will have a play over the weekend - If I get time, I'll run some benchmarks and the ship in a bottle thing - I'm dying to see how fast these Opterons run Solidworks and Maya. Cheers Deri

Paul,

I also run Mastercam, and many of the toolpaths I generate are very complex. My computer becomes next to useless while MC is crunching. Duals allows me to assign a processor to MC, and allow it to run in the background while I continue with other work.

Regards

Mark

advantages/disadvantages

Paul,

Yea.. I suppose. But nowhere near as fast.

Extra time is something I don't have.

Regards

Mark