Review: High End Workstation Chipsets

While it would have been nice to take a closer look at a board with matching spec to the X5DA8 motherboard, no such board exists just now. Asus get close with a slightly less meaty spec than the GCWS solution I described earlier in the PR-DLSW. However it ships with the CSB5 southbridge instead of the CSB6 and with no support for either 533MHz Xeon's or DDR266 memory with 400MHz and DDR200 being the maximum in each case. Intel themselves do a CMIC-LE based board (the SHG2) but without AGP which makes it useless for a high end workstation of the type I'm covering today. However from some research, it looks like up to date CMIC-LE based boards will be forthcoming from ServerWorks top tier partners. Asus look like a good bet to bring the PR-DLSW up to date in terms of GCWS components. It would offer up a nice opponent to the X5DA8 E7505 board with its consumer friendly CMI audio solution.

Layout wise, CMIC-LE boards do things differently from E7505 boards with the CPU sockets in the top left, chipset logic on the top right where the memory slots are on E7505, memory slots at the bottom right and the PCI slots in the same place as E7505 (naturally). EATX is the order of the day and the layout is somewhat cleaner in appearance to E7505 with core logic all in one corner of the board, seperating it from the rest of the board and making good use of effective trace routing and good signalling from the no doubt 6 or 8 layer PCB's.

Opteron

With Opteron debuting recently to a fantastic fan fare, it makes sense to have a quick chat about it before we finish. NVIDIA look like they will be first out of the starting blocks with an AGP equipped Opteron or Athlon64 solution. Single chip Opteron boards sporting the nForce3 Pro chipset have been spotted in the wild with a few pictures and spec sheets of an Asus example doing the rounds. While that particular board doesn't take full advantage of Opteron's multi processor platform support with only a single CPU socket, I don't see any reason why dual Opteron nForce3 Pro wont be a reality in the future.

HyperTransport forms the high speed link between processor(s), northbridge (sans memory controller which now resides on the CPU itself) and the rest of the system by means of efficient tunnels. HyperTransport bound data may pass through any number of on board tunnels contained in peripheral packages like the northbridge or PCI-X controller, along with the CPU's HT tunnels, on its way to another device. The low pin count, high efficiency and high bandwidth of HT links make it a near perfect peripheral and inter CPU interconnect. AGP equipped dual processor boards should be something to behold in terms of performance, that's for sure.

But without a shipping solution, all we can do is take an educated guess and speculate that it will join E7505 and GCWS as a high end workstation solution for AMD to be proud of. 64-bit too, least we forget.

Conclusion

So with AMD out of the high end workstation arena just now with nothing to really challenge a high end E7505 solution in terms of features or performance until AGP enabled boards show up, it's up to ServerWorks and Intel to provide you with products. I could witter on about Canterwood too, since it brings lots of CPU I/O bandwidth to the table along with dual channel DDR and Gigabit Ethernet. But it only supports one processor so tough luck, no mention here.

Opteron or Athlon64 and nForce3 Pro should make for an exciting AMD comeback. This article's focus is to bring high end hardware to the usual Hexus reader and to give a little taste into what goes on in the space above the consumer arena. It's worth remembering that the high end workstation technology of today is the regular consumer technology of tomorrow so you'll see E7505/GCWS like features in regular motherboards in the future.

As I said earlier, check out the 2CPU stuff on E7505 to get yourself more familiar with performance and the testing methodologies of boards like the X5DA8, it might even set you in good stead for upcoming Hexus articles.

Now where did I put that lottery ticket, I fancy an X5DA8, 12GB of Crucial, FireGL X1.......