Parhelia & Dual CPU Mobos

[Tapeworm]

Sorry to cross-post this question from the matrox site, but Shawn suggested that one of you might know more about this. I tried to look back a month, but didn't see anything on this topic.

I'd like to build a dual Xeon workstation with the Parhelia. I'm aware of difficulties with the Intel 860 chipset, but I was wondering if any of you had problems with the Intel E7500 or AMD MP chipsets. I'd like to stay with Intel, but I also want something faster than my G450, while maintaining the clarity.

Brooke

[K6-III]

I hear the Asus A7M266-D isn't too happy with Parhelia...but Iwill MPX2 should be OK...

[Tapeworm]

K6,

I really appreciate your reminding me to check here in the first place!

It's nice to know this doesn't iclude all the multi-processor boards, but it just seems kind of ironic that a company focusing on more business oriented workstations hasn't gotten around to testing this out on the Xeons yet .

[afterburn]

It's running happily and without any problems from day 1 on my Tyan Thunder K7.

[moreau]

I'm running a parhelia on an Asus CUV4X-D with dual 1GHz PIII's. This has a VIA chipset and PC133 SDRAM.

I have experienced no problems that I can associate with the dual cpu setup.

my powersupply is a PC Power and Cooling Silencer 400 ATX.

Good Luck,
Dr. Moreau

[Maggi]

My first attempts on a Tyan Tiger MPX (S2466N-4M) resulted in very odd behaviour and strange problems. Hence I tried the Asus A7M266-D and got different problems than before.

Since I had to reinstall the whole system again anyways, I decided to give the Tyan another go which got a BIOS update in between and this time all went well.

Ever since, I'm pretty impressed by performance and stability.

[albatorsk]

I'm running my Parhelia on an A7M266-D, and I have no problems what so ever with stability.. Performance, on the other hand...

[K6-III]

Your best setups for Dual AMD right now will probably be the Iwill, Gigabyte, or MSI boards at this time. If you can find the Epox you can consider it as well. I'm mostly partial to the MPX2 due to the great overclocking capabilities and excellent stability....very large board, however.

As far as XEON boards go, Iwill has their excellent i860 board available if you want to go RAMBUS...

[DGhost]

i have heard about too many problems with the IWill board to recommend it. add in my own experience with their boards and i refuse to recommend them because of their dreadful support. maybe for an i860 it would be good, but for their desktop stuff it was aweful... they stopped doing bios releases on products 9 months after their release, despite the fact that their final bios has problems.

The MSI board worked fine with the latest BIOS installed, so did the Tyans.

dunno about the gigabyte, and the EPoX should work fine...

[Tapeworm]

Thank's for all the great posts!

I'd kind of like to go with the 860, but that's the one board not recommended by Matrox at this point. I still haven't heard for sure if the E7500 is OK, but Matrox hasn't reported any problems with it yet.

The nice part of an E7500 system is that it's priced in the ballpark of an MPX2, but I don't know if it really offers much of a performance gain in my situation. I know this is heresy, but I'm not really looking to overclock. I just want a modestly fast, STABLE work machine that I don't have to mess with too much for the next year or two.

Now, if I could rationalize one of those water powered, silent boxes with a glowing window from the links on this site, that would be cool!

[beng3000]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the e7500 doesn't have an AGP slot. I have a Parhelia with an Iwill MPX2 (Rev 1.3) with no problems at all. As far as the lack of support from Iwill goes, I'd rather have poor support and good tech than the other way around. If you don't want to overclock, I woulddefinitely reccommend the Tyan board. Very stable and very few problems with it. MSI is good too, but I would forget about Gigabyte. As far as Xeons go, the only two choicesare Iwill and Supermicro and you can't go wrong with either (except that they cost $400 bucks).

A lot of guys running smp systems hang out in the 2cpu.com forums. You may want to ask your questions there.

[K6-III]

I suppose given your requirements I'd suggest the MSI K7D Master-L...

[DGhost]

Originally posted by beng3000
As far as the lack of support from Iwill goes, I'd rather have poor support and good tech than the other way around.

the hardware for the boards are fairly well manufactured and fairly well engineered, but they are still way to many little issues to really be a good choice for a stable system. sure, if you wanna overclock your system they will do it quite readily. they also have great performance. but, they still have way too many issues...

Edit: PCI Write issues is with the MPX chipset, not specific to the MPX2 boards.

[Tapeworm]

Beng,

After 3 hours on the phone with Intel, that's exactly what I discovered! I can't believe how stupid I was in my excitement. I made this HUGE mistaken assumption that the E7500 had AGP, and none of the first six people I spoke with at Intel corrected me. I guess I overlooked it because several of my friends planned on using it in their workstations. Those boards are REALLY only meant for servers (with their onboard 8MB ATI Rage XL), even though anything with that much raw power will do a decent job as a workstation, and it all fairness, they did test out OK with one of the older Matrox PCI cards. I realize the lines are blurry on what makes up a workstation, and they'll make great render farms, but at least I now know that the E7500 doesn't do what I want .

It finally answers my question. Unless the problems Matrox sited were only related to specific 860 based boards, there probably isn't a dual Xeon out there at this point that will work with the Parhelia.

Thank's so much for all your help. It saved me days of agony and RMAs, and you've offered great advice on alternatives.

Brooke

[Novdid]

Isn't this ironic...

Nobody has recommended any Intel combos, and on the other hand it's clear that Tapeworm wants an Intel combo...you can draw your own conclusions.

Funny ain't it.