Miller, Daniel J. wrote:
MSI-9131 and Arima HDAMA have both been good for us. One of our MSI's has 6gig of RAM, most of the rest of our systems have 4gig (or less).
From past personal experience with the Tyan 24XX (and other) boards, I'd stay away from Tyan. Supposedly Tyan boards are now OK (they won't just die after a few months to maybe 3 years) but I'd let someone else prove or disprove that supposition. The only other board line I've ever seen with a failure rate like Tyan's is PCChips.
I hate to be so negative about a line that has so many terrific looking board designs, but so it goes.
Maybe our distributor happened to store their Tyan boards next to an industrial microwave oven with broke shielding, leaving the boxes pristine but mortally wounded components inside, and no one but us has had reliability problems with Tyan boards - but I doubt it.
Tyan has been offering attractive designs for a long time. I remember an early dual Pentium (wouldn't support MMX, just Pentium) Tyan system that had a screwed up cache controller design limiting its effective memory support to 64 meg. At least that board didn't flat out fail after a year.
They make some very appealing systems, because they're often the first (or the only) company to offer some configurations, but I know that I've learned to find something else, however appealing the Tyan may look.
I'll probably get seduced into trying them again in about 2 years, but my most recent experiences (with some Athlon MP boards) will keep me away from Tyan for a while.
Get an Asus, MSI, or Arima board.
-----Original Message----- From: wam@mail.hiwaay.net [mailto:wam@mail.hiwaay.net] On Behalf Of William A. Mahaffey III Sent: Saturday, March 27, 2004 8:28 AM To: SuSE AMD 64 Mailing List Subject: [suse-amd64] Opteron Board preference ....
.... I am getting close to trying to build an Opteron based machine as a compute node on my LAN, set up to run w/o monitor, keybd, mouse, & not a file server, just a (fast) CPU & lots of RAM. I have narrowed down to either ASUS SK8V or TYAN Tomcat K8S (both available @ newegg.com). Does anyone have any strong (preferably firsthand :-)) opinions, yea or nay, about either of these boards ? Thanks in advance.
Thanks, I was leaning TYAN, but I'll poke around a bit more. Those Arima HDAMA boards look nice. I was looking to do a single-CPU to start with, kinda pilot things to start with. I may revisit ASUS. Thanks.