Tyan K8WE (S2895) & Opteron 270 versus 290 with games

I built a Maximum PC "Dream Machine" approximately two years ago with
a Tyan K8WE (S2895) motherboard. At the time, I used Opteron Italy
270 processors. I've noticed that AMD is now up to 290 processors for
the same socket. Obviously they are faster, but would they make any
difference in games or just with high-level math type operations?

My guess is that most of my bottlenecks in my system are elsewhere,
but I'm always tempted by upgrades. I have an MSI 8800GTX video card
and 8 GB of RAM. My 3ware SATA RAID 5 is slow but reliable.

Thank you!

 

Dear Jim,

here are some socket 940 CPUs compared:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...2E16819103022,N82E16819105110,N82E16819105112

270, 280, and 290:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...2E16819103552,N82E16819103573,N82E16819105110

209 is $719.00: if you need two of them, that's a hefty chunk of
change. 2.0 to 2.8: definitely faster, but, as you said, for gaming,
it depends on where your bottleneck is, and games will not necessarily
going to be faster--I think you have ECC RAM, so that slows things down
a bit for games, unless I am mistaken....

Apparently Barcelona (quad core) is going to be very good--though there
is no objective evidence of that just yet, only rumors....

You could wait for a Barcelona with a new single CPU motherboard,
recycle your 8800GTX into the new system....I think I would wait and
see, as prices on the socket 940 CPUs have not dropped like they have
for AM2 and Intel's 775.....

HTH,

BC

 

Dear BC,

Thanks! It appears that the *only* difference in the chips, other
than the increase in clock speed, is the increase in the L1 cache from
64K to 128K. That doesn't sound like a huge change to me.

I think you're right about the memory. ECC PC2700 memory is
*extremely* slow by today's standards. It was slow even by the
standards when I built the machine. I mostly built it (a) to try a
dual-processor motherboard and (b) to have a 133 MHz PCI-X slot for
the SATA RAID card. SATA 2 came out just as I build the machine, so I
have an SATA 2 RAID card running at 133 MHz. I think my error was
that it was just too damn expensive to build in the first place. The
operating system is what fooled me. I could buy a 64-bit operating
system, Windows Professional x64, for only $100.00 from New Egg at the
time, which supported dual processors. Now, however, I am screwed.
The Vista upgrade would be to Ultimate to keep the dual processors and
all the other gaming features. (None of the consumer versions of
Vista support dual processors.)

The motherboards would probably be quite a bit better then as well.
I've been noticing that the new boards have all sorts of heat pipes
and advanced feature sets that the K8WE didn't have. It was a really
nice board, particularly the on-board SCSI, but some of the newer
boards are even nicer.

That sounds like a good idea. I do like these server motherboards,
for the SCSI and 64-bit slots, but they really aren't built for
performance. I sort of build a machine which was a bridge to
nowhere. <g>

Thanks for your advice!

Jim