Hello 64 World - My proposed 3Ware system

[David O'Brien]

On Thu, May 05, 2005 at 09:52:33AM -0400, Toll, Eric wrote:
> I am going to build a new server! (I'm excited) below is my shopping
> list, this all started with a desire to have a Raid FreeBSD system.
> RAID led me to 3Ware, current offerings from 3Ware were of *only* the
> 64 Bit PCI flavor, my current MB didn't have it [Cheep SIS with (1)
> Athlon XP2400+ with WD PATA IDE 40GB]  So I looked for mainboards that
> had a 66Mhz 64bit PCI slot, from 3Ware's hardware compatibility list.
> Found a good one I hope with the Gigabyte board. So now I'm thinking
> instead of FreeBSD 5.3 or 5.4 to go with the FreeBSD-AMD64 version.
> 
> Comments welcome, anyone see any issues?
> 
> Anyone else have a Gigabyte board with (GA-7A8DW  AMD 8111/8131) 
> Chipset running AMD-64?

It is hard to find information about this motherboard at Gigabyte's USA
site (since you're mentioning $$).   Where have you found to buy it?
This motherboard has a 4+0 DIMM configuration, which means you are (1)
limited to 4 DIMM's, (2) only get 1/2 the possible memory bandwidth.  I'm
not saying this is an absolutely terrible thing, but be aware of it.

I fear this board won't get good BIOS support - looking at the list of
downloadable BIOS updates, I cannot tell what any of them fix.  Worse is
no confidence Gigabyte will support the new Opteron revision E (90nm)
processors, including dual-core ones.

I'm not sure why you are looking at an AGP based motherboard for a
server.

-- 
-- David  (obrien at FreeBSD.org)