Armari's Gravistar XR
Armari supplied the test platform for my look at dual-core Opteron. A Supermicro SC733T-645 SATA Workstation Chassis, in black, housed all the components. The SC733T is a mid-sized chassis that can take Extended ATX mainboards, with a pair of 120mm 4-pin PWM fans providing the airflow from the front-bottom of the chassis to the exhaust at the rear.Integrated into the SC733T was a Tyan Thunder K8WE mainboard. The K8WE is based on nForce4 Pro and provides a pair of PEG16X slots for SLI-ready graphics, with each slot receiving the full 16 lanes of PCI Express due to the use of two nForce4 ASICs (2200 and 2050). An AMD 8131 provides the PCI-X segment bridges. The mainboard supports up to 16GB of memory with four slots connected to each processor. For maximum memory density, you need to use 2GiB modules, and the mainboard requires the use of registered DIMMs, with or without ECC ability. Being dual-channel, both memory controllers (if you're using two CPUs) sport 6.4GiB/sec of theoretical memory bandwidth, for a 12.8GiB/sec system total.
Supplied with four 1GiB sticks, two for each processor, the Armari test platform therefore had a full 4GiB in total. Two Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 250GB hard disks were connected to the 2200 ASICs SATA controller for 500GB of total storage. Armari installed Windows XP Professional (32-bit) on one hard disk, with XP Pro 64-bit on the other, leaving me free to just change the boot order in the BIOS depending on what OS I wanted to test.
Two Opteron 875 processors sat in the pair of sockets, each with a pair of 2.2GHz cores with 128KiB of L1 cache and 1MiB of L2. L2 on Opteron is just a retirement cache for L1 in essence, and they're exclusive, so L1 isn't mirrored in L2.
Armari also supplied an NVIDIA Quadro FX 3400 and an ATI FireGL 7100, both on PCI Express, but testing time pressure means an article featuring them will have to wait until another day. Pictures? Thought you'd never ask.
Pictures
Summary
Armari came up trumps for us again, with a really well integrated test system in their favourite SATA-only chassis.My thanks to Dan and his team for building the test box at such short notice, especially since they had no 275s to hand and had to use the £1500 875s instead. With them knowing I'd have the heatsinks off and the CPUs out in my grubby mits for pictures, that's a fine display of faith in my cackhanded ability to handle hardware.
