Our recent NVIDIA 780a launch article generated a lot of reader responses, especially in the email category.  As of today, we have received a few 780a/750a samples for analysis and will go into specific details such as SLI scaling, power management, and overclocking in the individual board reviews.  In the meantime, we have a couple of updates for points raised in our launch article.

1. ASUS provided a new BIOS that greatly improves memory compatibility, especially with 2GB modules.  The problem we incurred with not being able to change the on-board video memory and POST with a 4x1GB or 2x2GB memory configuration is solved now.   In fact, the ability to run at DDR2-1066 with a 2x2GB setup is perfectly stable and performance is decent based on our results listed below.

2.  Using the 175.16 release drivers, we still could not discern a difference a measurable performance difference between the 8500GT in a standalone configuration or in Hybrid SLI operation.   We are continuing to work with NVIDIA and ASUS on this problem.

3.  Quad SLI operates correctly on the 780a platform; however, our initial results with a 9850BE processor are somewhat disappointing as several titles actually experienced reduced performance compared to a single 9800GX2 card.  We will provide results and a SLI scaling comparison to an Intel processor based 780i system shortly. For those who have generated 3DMark Vantage scores utilizing the High setting with a Quad SLI system, we are providing our results shown below with the 9850BE processor.

4.  The ability to overclock our 9850BE has improved from 2.8GHz to right over 3.02GHz with the latest 0802 BIOS release from ASUS.  MSI has provided an updated BIOS release for their 780a board that is reaching 3GHz at this moment also.  We are continuing to work with the suppliers and will have final overclock capabilities shortly.

Over the years I've shared bits and pieces of my life with you all, and today I'm going to share quite possible the biggest and most important one.

When I was younger, my mom and I had the typical mom/son relationship.  I wanted to sit around and play video games and she wanted me to read books.  I wanted toys, she wanted me to do something useful in my life.  When you're younger, you don't really understand the importance of something like that, I know I didn't.  

We fought a lot during my early teenage years; I'm her only child and thus you can imagine she'd be a little protective, which when you're a teenager isn't what you want, although now looking back, I wouldn't have it any other way.  

In the early days of AnandTech, even once the site was making money and I genuinely had a job, she always made sure I did my homework before I could even so much as start a benchmark.  She was proud of what I'd done, but my mom has always viewed education as one of the most important things in life.  Even today she continues to encourage me to go back for graduate school.  I think I will at some point, I just don't have the time right now.  

We used to argue about AnandTech vs. school so much, at least in the early days.  If I brought home a B on my report card she'd lock my "lab" (a tiny bedroom in our first house in Raleigh).  I eventually learned to pick the lock and sneak in some testing but that's beside the point.  

The older I got, the more I began to understand and the better our relationship became.  One day, I remember walking to class at NCSU and it all just hit me.  Every little thing she had ever done for me or showed me finally clicked.  I've always loved my mom, but on that day I finally understood her.  

She always did everything she could to make sure we had a good life.  She dropped out of graduate school to take care of me, she would never even let me have a babysitter, she lost countless opportunities because of me and she never made me feel guilty about it.  She did it out of love.  She did it because she is my mom.  

There's not a single aspect of my life that she hasn't played a significant role in.  I've always given credit to the readers for why AnandTech exists, but there's also her.  When the site needed it, when I needed it, she was always there to lend a hand without asking for anything in return.  

It was easy for me to call my mom overprotective, but that was a youthful mistake.  To understand her and to comprehend the sort of love she had for her son, that took age.  The younger me knew that age doesn't mean anything; you can never be too old or too young for something, it's a matter of your own readiness.  The older me learned that while specific age may not matter, some things do improve over time.  The older I get, the more I understand that there's very little I know about life.  

People can be real funny about success.  While I do believe that hard work is an important ingredient in being successful, in my opinion it only gets you half way.  The rest is pure luck.  What makes me believe that more than anything is the fact that I didn't get to choose my parents or their situation.  No one does.  I was very lucky to be raised the way I was and I can't begin to even express how thankful I am to have a mother like my own.  If you ask me why I think I made it this far, I'd say it's because of her.

My mom has always shown me that you really can do anything in this life, you simply have to learn and try.  She used to speak 6 different languages, she played volleyball, basketball, and badminton.  When we lived in New Hampshire she learned how to install a shower, tile a floor and build a bathroom.  She started a restaurant when we lived up north, even when others said she couldn't do it, she did.  She basically built my house while I lived in Connecticut.  She's managed the finances for AnandTech She has never had any formal training in anything she's attempted, she majored in math, and I've never seen her give up.

The only thing she admits that she can't fix are computer problems.  But leave it to my mom to find a solution: she made me.  

She's shown me that you can do anything, and she's been an inspiration to me all my life.  I've always known that I can do anything, but it's because she's always been at my side.  Without her, I wouldn't be able to do what I do for a living.  Over the past 11 years my job has become a pillar of my life and I can guarantee you that without her help, I wouldn't be able to have that.  

Her whole life she has worked to make me happy, and I've always wanted to work so that she didn't have to.  It's this constant struggle between us.  I'll look outside my window and find her doing something silly like trying to take care of my yard.  I've stolen her wheelbarrow and gardening tools on numerous occasions :)

I'm just scratching the surface here.  For the past 11 years I've written about countless products, technologies and even some people, but it was about time that I wrote about her.  There's a part of me in everything I write, it's my passion.  She's never asked for anything and there's no way I could give her what she has given me, so today I give her a part of me as I write this for her.

To my mom and mothers of geeks everywhere: Happy Mother's Day.

This weekend, my mom (the true talent in the family) helped to get the screen fabric on the frame we built months earlier. The fabric was actually one of the first things I ordered last year; I snagged 154" x 65" of Da-Lite's Cinema Vision material from AV-Outlet, back then I expected the screen to be 144" wide and I ordered an extra 10" to make sure I had enough room to play with. The 132" screen I ended up with left me with more than enough screen material, which was nice since it allowed us to screw up the installation a bit without sacrificing the entire roll of material. The fabric cost less than $500.

Actually mounting the fabric to the curved frame was an absolute pain, but thanks to my mom and Lyle (a friend celebrating his 26th birthday today), we managed to get it done and the end result is absolutely beautiful.

With the screen done, we mounted the CineSlide and ISCO III and after some regularly scheduled Saturday evening festivities, Manny and I stayed up until 4AM and got the damn thing working. We've only got three speakers hooked up and there's a lot of tweaking that needs to be done, but we're making real progress:

I'm exhausted and going to bed, more progress in the next couple of weeks.

Oh we're getting close.

With doors hung and all of the drywall work done in the rest of the basement (and thus no chance for even more dust to get in the theater), we put in the call for the carpeting people to bring the theater carpet by. Ryan Kramer (the designer of the theater) suggested 'Wavelength' from Masland Carpet and he updated the render to include what the carpet would look like installed:

It's definitely a busy carpet but I'm hoping it'll break up the monotony of black walls and black seats, not to mention that it's going to be pretty dark in there so hopefully it'll add some visual interest to the floor. We'll see what happens come next Wednesday :)

I've been trying to get things moving on the theater for the past couple of weeks, last night Manny and I tried to get the CineSlide and ISCO III (anamorphic lens) working. I didn't have a remote for the CineSlide so we spliced a 9-pin serial cable and a 4-pin RJ11 (telephone) cable together to control the device. If you happen to own a CineSlide, do remember that you can't just use a standard serial-to-CAT5 adapter, the sled only needs two pins connected and they are not a part of the standard serial-to-CAT5 pinout for an adapter you'd use to configure a router for example.

Getting the CineSlide working wasn't much of an issue after we built the right cable, send it a command to turn on, send it another to slide the lens in front of the projector and another to slide it out of the way. Unfortunately after getting the slide working we discovered a problem. The CineSlide was the only thing we hadn't tested at this point, and I had just assumed that we could make the lens stop wherever we needed it to. Unfortunately it can only slide completely to one side or the other, and there wasn't enough room on the reinforced mounting surface near the projector to accommodate this. The problem was that when in the "on" position, the lens would slide too far to the left and not let the light beam pass through. I had to move the projector, so today I did that:

See how the PJ is now left justified? Thankfully, like many of these projectors, it has a horizontal lens shift that will allow me to continue to project at the center of the screen

I also got to see how troublesome it would be to remove the projector once in its little hideaway. The process takes two people and a good 20 - 30 minutes to do carefully, and it's going to be even more of a pain once there are seats in the theater. If I had to do it again I'd drop the projector even further down from the ceiling just to make swapping/maintenance easier. Tomorrow, if I've got time, I'll get the CineSlide and anamorphic lens installed up there too.

I'm trying to get the screen fabric installed, but before that I needed to cover the OC703 along the front wall. I used velcro and tacks to cover the OC703 with accoustically transparent cloth:

The screen frame is also wrapped with fidelio velvet that I ordered from here (remember the starfield ceiling website? this one is almost as good). The velvet is great at absorbing light, so any overscan from the projector hopefully won't be too distracting:

It's soft

...and dark

Check out the gallery for more pictures of the current state, tomorrow if I can get enough help from friends and fam we may be able to make some serious progress...

Cellshock recently sent us 4GB of their latest high-end performance DDR3 memory kit that we will be reviewing shortly. In the meantime, the press release is listed below along with some of our initial comments.

"This is the top of the line CellShock memory and is targeted at enthusiasts and high end gamers. These memory Kits are based on very best chips, which enables it to run at notably higher speeds or more aggressive timings than its official specification. The 1866 kits have been tested on several platforms based on Intel P35/X38/X48 and Nvidia 790 Chipsets and achieve memory speeds beyond 1900Mhz with 8-8-8 timings and 1800Mhz with 7-7-7 timings. This additional overclocking headroom enables users to push their memory and their cpu and mainboards to the limit, achieving new performance heights.

While working closely with enthusiasts, hardware experts, mainboard manufacturers and reviewers around the world, we came to the conclusion that the fastest possible 24/7 System configuration that can be achieved is an FSB of 466Mhz with a memory speed of 1866Mhz with a tRD (performance level) of 6. This configuration is possible with all High End CPUs, even Intel QuadCore processors, and High End Mainboards with moderate voltage levels. The 1866 Kits are equipped with our well known massive Aluminum Heatspreaders, this time in a beautiful metallic-blue and silver combination, and instead of thick thermal pads thermal grease is used to ensure optimum cooling."

The theater has been progressing well, especially over the past couple of weeks. First off we had to put up all of the treatments on the walls:

We used two types of materials: OC703 (2" thick, covered with FSK along the rear wall) and Bonded Acoustical Cotton (2" thick). Bryan Pape, the audio guru, listed their roles as follows:

OC703 is for Front corner triangles, front wall, and rear wall. FSK is to be bonded to the rear wall material - FSK toward the room
but foil side toward the fiberglass.

Triangles in front corners are 17x17x24" stacked floor to ceiling. Balance of front wall is 2" bonded to the wall. BAC is bonded acoustical cotton and is for the side walls. 5' high from bass absorbers to the 2nd column on the side wall, 4' high from there back.

Getting them on the walls was pretty easy, just used liquid nails to adhere them and then a screw with a fender washer for added security. Having pulled at least one of them down since then, liquid nails alone should honestly suffice.

With the treatments up, I needed to get a few other things done. The soffit/light tray needed to be finished. While it was already sheetrocked it needed to be mudded, sanded then painted.

A friend of mine has been decorating my house for the past few months now and she picked Behr's Stone Hearth color as a match for what was in the renders. She's got an amazing eye for design and the color came out great:

The theater also finally has power. Some of the lighting fixtures have already been installed, although I'm waiting on getting the cloth panels up on the walls before putting the sconces on the walls.

Lighting in the room is controlled by a Lutron GRAFIK Eye 3000. The GRAFIK Eye is a multi-zone programmable dimmer, which lets you dim lights individually as well as create presets for the levels of all of the lights. With an optional $700 serial interface (that's right, $700 for a serial port) you can connect the GRAFIK Eye to a computer. The goal here is to connect the GRAFIK Eye to the HTPC and have the lights dim to the right levels once you start watching a movie.

The theater also now has doors. The doors are are non-hollow Masonite Safe and Sound doors from Home Depot, nothing too special about them other than the fact that they are supposed to be better at not transmitting sound. I'm not 100% sure on what I'm going to do to the doors (e.g. whether or not to attempt to cover them with GoM on the inside of the theater or just leave them looking like doors), but I've got time to figure that out.

There are only a couple of major construction items that need to be taken care of in the room and once we get it cleaned up, the actual carpeting can go in.

Western Digital is finally launching a successor to the Raptor EL150 family of drives that has been around since 2003.  This enterprise designed drive series is one that quickly made its home on just about every enthusiast desktop.  Capacities started at 36GB, soon grew to 76GB, and then topped out at 150GB for what seemed like an eternity.  The new drive appropriately goes by the name, VelociRaptor, and is part of the upcoming VR150 product family. Western Digital is launching this drive at a 300GB capacity point with other capacity points potentially available in the near future.

 

One of the most interesting aspects of the new drive is its 2.5" form factor.  This little wonder packs two 150GB platters featuring 10K-RPM spindle speeds into a 2.5" drive placed in a new 3.5" carrier design dubbed the "IcePAK".  This sled features 13 cooling fins that dissipates heat quickly and still allows it to fit in a standard 3.5" drive bay.

We have looked forward to putting this drive through its paces for the past several months since WD first hinted at a Raptor replacement.  Our interest grew to a fever pitch last month after being briefed by Western Digital on the VelociRaptor's specifications and knowing a release date had been set for April.  We anxiously awaited for test-drives to arrive a couple of weeks ago. As it turns out we received the drive just a few days ago, but were excited at the prospect of a sleepless weekend to see just how well this drive would stack up to the latest competition.

A sleepless weekend is what we got all right, just for all the wrong reasons.  We kept noticing the performance of the drive was just not "right".  It was certainly faster than its predecessor, but not by the margin, we expected.  At times, the benchmark numbers were actually slower than several current 7200RPM drives and this brought out the yellow flag.

Our HDTune and HDTach results kept indicating a massive drop in transfer rates on the outer diameter of the platters, an area where the drive should be the fastest and not the slowest.  This pattern continued with our IPEAK and file transfer tests.  Eventually, we noticed this speed bump also occurred in several of our application tests where the drive just never seemed to get out of the gates quickly but would eventually catch up with and at times surpass our other drives.

Western Digital informed us the press review samples were engineering drives with early firmware.  In fact, Western Digital felt so strongly about this that they included errata in the press kit stating the firmware was about 90% completed.  We agree with them.  WD confirmed our performance problems and erratic results late yesterday.  It turns out the performance drops at the outer diameter are related to the tuning of the servo algorithm.  WD had not finalized this tuning when the press sample drives shipped with firmware 03.03VOX.

Western Digital will have this performance drop out fixed before releasing the drives to Alienware next week or retail channels in late May.  That said, our “preview” of the drive will be published shortly.  We did not want to post a review that offered inconclusive or inconsistent results until we verified problems encountered during testing.  As such, we do not plan to “review” the drive until final firmware is available.

Dell's top-end LCD recently made headlines when it disappeared from the Dell website. There has been no official recall of 3008 LCDs already shipped, which leaves some users wondering if they might get stuck owning a $2000 v1.0 lemon. We first heard about the 3008WFP in late 2007, and quite a few were on display at the Dell CES 2008 booth. We've had a standing request in with Dell to get a review sample as soon as possible, but we're still waiting on that. We asked our Dell contacts about the status of the 3008WFP in order to get some clarification. Here's the official word:

"The Dell 3008 monitor has been well received since launch and has been very popular with customers. In February we experienced a small technical issue with the product that has been long resolved. Currently the monitors are on extended lead times and in order to manage demand, the 3008 is not available on dell.com. We are managing orders on a prioritized basis and hope to have the product available to all customers in the near future. The Dell 3007 and 2707 monitors, also very popular with customers, are available at dell.com."

Dell wouldn't go into additional details other than to state that the technical issue is resolved and they are currently playing catch up to fulfill the large demand for the 3008WFP. That is why they are managing orders on a prioritized basis and have (temporarily) removed it from their website. The older 3007WFP remains available, of course.

So what could have caused the problems and who does this affect? We'd love to know more about what may or may not be wrong with the earlier revisions; it could be that any technical issues were corrected before end customers actually started receiving product. [Ed: Speculation Alert! Take the following with a grain of salt.] The most likely culprit for problems would be with the new technologies incorporated into the 3008WFP. For starters, this is the first Dell 2560x1600 LCD to include a hardware scaler. That allows it to support multiple input options, rather than being limited to dual-link DVI. The hardware scaler may also introduce some input lag - something we will be sure to test when we receive our review sample. We do know that of the LCDs we've tested so far, the lowest input lag so far comes on the 30" LCDs we have.

The other new technology is DisplayPort, yet another digital video standard that takes the place of DVI/HDMI. Whether or not DisplayPort is actually necessary is something that can be debated, but as a long-term solution it does offer benefits over DVI. The current standard offers better bandwidth, with support for up to 10.2 Gb/s; that matches HDMI 1.3, and exceeds single-link DVI (3.96 Gb/s) and dual-link DVI (7.92 Gb/s) by a substantial amount. DisplayPort is a packetized protocol, which means it is much easier to increase the bandwidth and capabilities in the future. Perhaps most important is that it is a license-free and royalty-free standard, unlike HDMI, and it still supports audio, unlike DVI. The drawback, of course, is that as a new standard it will require new displays and graphics cards and will likely introduce a short-term price premium relative in devices that support the technology.

All that talk of DisplayPort being a potential cause for the delays does have some other circumstantial evidence to back it up. We received a Dell 2408WFP for review about two months ago - another LCD that supports DisplayPort. Before we could complete the review, however, Dell requested that we send the sample back as it was a pre-production model and the retail versions were not identical. Was this another "technical issue" causing delays? Dell would not confirm; all we know is that the pre-production display performance was "slightly different than what is shipping to customers". However, it did take two months before we received an updated 2408WFP for review. We are happy to report that we now have the 2408WFP and several other 24" LCDs, and we are hard at work on a 24" LCD roundup. [Ed: /speculation]

While we're here talking about Dell's 3008WFP, it's probably a good idea to give our overall take on the 30" LCD market. While the added flexibility of multiple inputs may be useful to some people, if you only plan to connect a 30" LCD to a single PC you're probably best off saving money and buying one of the currently shipping 30" offerings. Unfortunately, we have yet to receive review samples of many of the 30" LCD offerings. However, our favorite so far - in terms of price and features - is the HP LP3065, since you get three dual-link DVI inputs for a reasonable price of $1200-$1300. That's a slight price premium relative to the Dell 3007WFP-HC ($1150-$1200), or you could opt for the more expensive ($1700) Gateway XHD3000 with support for multiple video inputs, similar to the 3008WFP. The Dell and HP LCDs are S-IPS, which we feel puts them at the top of the totem pole in terms of overall quality. However, the Gateway uses an S-PVA panel, and since we haven't used it in person we'll withhold judgment for now.

High VTT sends our best QX9650 to an early grave...

We have been using this particular QX960 processor for an upcoming X48 comparison article and testing was going quite well (not blaming a particular board somehow seems appropriate). We thought we had made it past that mystical, magical, and more importantly, stable mark of 450FSB with a Quad Core. However, in order to get to that point on this particular board, we (Editor- Raja in case the police get involved) made the mistake of using a very high VTT termination voltage of 1.51V (VTT is used to terminate data lines between the MCH and CPU).

We should have known better really, especially after Kris posted up a recommended voltage-operating chart in the ASUS Striker II Extreme review.  We do not know what is worse now, Kris saying I told you so (jokingly, well maybe not) or the thought of replacing this $1000 CPU.   We thought it would be beneficial for others to learn from our mistakes so here goes.

This particular CPU was a great example of a QX9650 hitting 4GHz stable at a mere 1.29V on most motherboards (tears are flowing in the beer tonight). We know users are running VTT voltages even higher than ours on 45nm processors and probably have not had a problem yet. We will run high VTT voltages in short bursts to test the limits of the board and CPU. However, this is the first time we have tried anything over 1.45V on a 24+-hour basis to test application stability.

Let this be a warning – do not go over 1.4V maximum for 24/7 use! We are certain that the high VTT voltage and extended testing was the cause of death, as we made no other major or obvious changes within the BIOS that could have instigated a failure. Obviously, we tried to boot the processor in a number of other motherboards without success before we decided to post our results up.

This is our first 45nm Quad core processor we managed to kill outright during testing.  We hope it is the last one too. The problem is that we also have a Q9300 that is on life support after experiencing a 36-hour run at 435FSB with VTT set to 1.45V. While our experiences might not represent results elsewhere, we thought our advice to just, “Say no to high VTT” is worth a quick post.  We have had enough VTT/GTL adjusting in the last year to last us a lifetime – just give us Nehalem quickly, please.

We have had a flurry of activity in the labs since posting our diatribe a few days ago. We have had almost round the clock conversations with the manufacturers on the items we discussed along with additional testing of newly arrived replacement products. There has also been an avalanche of comments, emails, and forum messages asking for additional information, commentary, or clarification of our statements and/or opinions. Here are the current 780G updates and we will discuss any additional information we gather over the next couple of days in the upcoming articles. We will provide an update to the 790i and Gigabyte 680i in our next blog shortly.

AMD 780G Update

We would like to reiterate that our problems with the AMD 780G motherboards are not chipset related. The problems revolve around the capability of current designs to properly handle the 125W TDP processors at stock settings or when overclocked. As we stated in our first article, the vast majority of users will never install a Phenom 9850BE or Athlon 6400+ X2 in these boards.

The motherboard manufacturers designed these particular products for the SOHO, casual gaming, and HTPC audiences with a price target in the $70~$90 range. This market sector typically will utilize a processor such as the LE1600, 3800+ X2, 4850e, or maybe even a 5000+ BE for their needs. As such, the power delivery design and electrical layout on the boards target the 45W~95W TDP processors. We have yet to have a failure utilizing any processor that meets these criteria after a few thousand hours of collective testing on our 780G motherboards.

However, we typically step outside the bounds of a given market sector in order to fully test the capabilities of the board and in hopes of finding one of those rare hidden jewels in the budget sector that offers performance equal to the high-end products. That is what leads us down the path of trying AMD’s finest series of desktop processors on their entry-level chipset. Of course, we found that path to be full of obstacles after suffering through several failures. We discussed this with the manufacturers at length and with AMD.

While a board’s PWM/MOSFET count generally indicates its capability to handle a particular load rating, it does not always indicate its ability to properly regulate, correct, and deliver clean power. That is why a board with a properly designed four-phase system can offer improved quality/performance over a poorly designed five- or six-phase system. All of our boards in the roundup utilize a decent three- or four-phase PWM design, with the exception of the ASRock board that features a five-phase design. Does this mean that the ASRock board will handle the 9850BE without a problem? Not necessarily, as there is more to our story than PWM design.

The critical aspect of running a 9850BE at stock speeds on the current 780G boards centers on the cooling of the PWM circuitry. Each and every manufacturer along with AMD agreed that cooling the MOSFETS properly was critical to the successful operation of the board at stock or overclocked speeds with the 9850BE - and to some degree, the 6400+ X2. The lack of space around the CPU area in the uATX design results in a crowding of components leading to additional thermal loads. This type of thermal loading is not prevalent in most ATX designs utilizing similar PWM components or the space that an additional/improved phase design (with associated components) affords.

We have measured MOSFET temperatures ranging from 128C~146C utilizing the stock CPU cooler on the 9850BE in our Silverstone SG03 case (temps were about the same in our Thermaltake and Zalman cases). While cooling of the PWM/MOSFET area is critical, most of the manufacturers admitted that improved component choices and electrical layouts similar to the 790FX boards is also required to ensure a robust design for users who are on the more enthusiastic side. However, this means additional costs that would place the board out of its intended market, a market where probably 98% of users would not worry about running a 125W TDP processor. For those who demand this extra level of performance, we expect to see several 780G ATX designs in May offering improved PWM designs.

Our primary concern about using the 9850BE or any other processors with this excellent chipset centers on the CPU support lists and general product marketing information available at the various manufacturer websites. We are happy to report that several of the manufacturers have been busy updating their 780G product information the past few days - something we appreciate, and we hope you will also.

First up is Gigabyte; they have added the newly released Phenoms to their CPU Support list and another surprise listing. The 9850BE has now appeared, although it's listed as unofficially supported. We asked Gigabyte about this and they responded that AMD has not qualified the 9850BE for the 780G uATX platforms. However, after running significant stress tests, Gigabyte is confident their GA-MA78GM-S2H board will operate correctly at stock speeds with the 9850BE. They have provided us with significant test data of the board running in a hotbox (no additional cooling) at 50C ambient temperatures for the past several days. This includes both stock and mildly overclocked settings.

We have received our replacement GA-MA78GM-S2H and have experienced varying results with it the past couple of days. Our particular setup has been prone to automatic shutdowns every 17 to 44 minutes when running OCCT, Crysis, or PCMark Vantage without additional cooling around the CPU area, primarily the MOSFETS. However, unlike our first board, the system recovers after a short cool down period. At first glance, an automatic shutdown would lead us to believe that the CPU is overheating. This is not the case, as the CPU never exceeded 48C during testing. We strongly believe the culprit is the lack of airflow across the MOSFETS as our next test session will indicate.

After placing an additional case fan over the PWM/MOSFET area, our board completed three hours of OCCT, two hours of our Crysis demo looping, and over five hours of PCMark Vantage looping. We only had one shutdown of OCCT and that was at the one hour, six minute mark, but it has not occurred again. We are still working with Gigabyte on our shutdown scenario without additional cooling along with a few BIOS related problems we have experienced when trying to overclock the 9850BE. At this time, we will defer to Gigabyte’s “official unofficial” support of the 9850BE as being their stamp of approval for running this CPU on the GA-MA78GM-S2H.

Next up is ASRock; they added the Phenom 9850BE to their CPU Support list this week for the A780FullDisplayPort. ASRock has stated to us that they are officially supporting the 9850BE at stock and overclocked settings. They based this qualification on their board passing AMD’s internal CPU test tool, SST version 4.7.4, without any problems or errors. However, our test results have been similar to the Gigabyte board. We have not noticed any stability or shutdown problems to date with additional cooling over the PWM/MOSFET area, even with the processor overclocked slightly to 2.7GHz. Like the Gigabyte board, the A780FullDisplayPort has recovered from the shutdowns after a cooling off period.

Random shutdowns have occurred without extra cooling utilizing the same applications tested on the Gigabyte board. ASRock just sent a revised BIOS that has additional tuning and support for the 9850BE that we will test later today. ASRock believes strongly that the retail heatsink is the problem. It appears not enough airflow is generated in a radial pattern to properly cool the MOSFETS. We will perform testing today with a new Thermaltake low profile fan/heatsink to test this theory.

We just started testing (who would have thought having three 9850BE processors on-hand would not be enough?) on the Jetway PA78GT3-DG with the 9850BE today. Jetway is confident their board will support and operate properly with the 9850BE after internal testing this week. Jetway has not updated their CPU Support List yet, but we expect them to shortly.

ECS, ASUS, Biostar, and J&W will not be supporting the 9850BE on the boards we discussed in our previous article. J&W did state that with proper cooling around the PWM/MOSFET area that their board would run the 9850BE, but they do not recommend it. We wholeheartedly agree. ASUS did provide their ATX based M3A-H/HDMI board with a 4+1 Phase design. We just received an updated BIOS for the B3 stepping processors and will commence testing later today. All of the manufacturers plan to have their CPU Support Lists updated shortly. Currently we have three 780G uATX boards that will support the 9850BE with full backing from the respective manufacturers. All of the manufacturers committed to providing updated CPU Support Information and additional warnings or advisories to the user if required. We will have a progress report this weekend on our test results and any additional information from Gigabyte, ASRock, and Jetway.

Other Items of Interest

Our sources have told us that the Intel G45 is suffering growing pains. The current revision is locked at a 667MHz GPU core speed and the VC1/H.264 decoder capabilities are turned off. A new revision will be available in July with the 800MHz GPU core speed and VC1/H.264 decoder capabilities turned on. In essence, the first chipsets (if they are available) will be nothing more than a G35+. We will update this information as we receive additional information.

We have been banging our heads against the wall for the last few weeks testing various sound cards for a roundup. Our ASUS Xonar DX and D2X PCI Express cards would not work properly on ASUS’ own 680i/780i/790i motherboards, but worked superbly on the Intel X48/P35 and AMD 780G/790FX boards. It turns out the Oxygen chipset that ASUS utilizes (AV100/200) is not designed for PCI Express operation. ASUS gets around the problem by utilizing a PLX bridge chipset to provide PCI Express functionality. According to ASUS, NVIDIA has confirmed the problem and will be providing a core BIOS update shortly to fix it.

Finally. 7 months after the introduction of Intel's "Tigerton" Xeon 73xx series, AMD has an answer to the quad socket, quad-core Intel platform. The importance of the quad socket market cannot be understated for AMD. The quad socket market is only 10% of the x86 server CPU market (shipments), but it accounts for roughly 20% of the revenues! And it has been AMD's stronghold for years now: at the moment, AMD still holds about 42% of this market. The 4P product line is probably keeping AMD afloat....

AMD launches the B3 "no-TLB bug" Opterons today, with clock speeds of 2.3GHz (8356), 2.2GHz (8354) and 2GHz (8350). Hotheaded (125W) 2.5GHz and 2.4GHz Special Editions will follow. We are preparing a full AMD vs. Intel 16-core benchmark fest, but the boards and servers that will house our Opteron 8356 CPUs still haven't arrived.

Let us take a look at Intel's and AMD's 1K pricing:

The Opteron 8354 and 8350 look like the most competitive offerings; they have a small clock speed advantage over the comparable Intel CPUs and about the same amount of cache. As we have discussed in depth in our 2P Opteron 23xx versus Intel Xeon 54xx review, quad-core Intel is the best processor in all CPU intensive tasks (rendering, chess, SPECint, financial simulations...). Meanwhile, the quad-core Opteron is best in some memory and FP intensive workloads (many HPC applications).We don't expect anything to change with the B3 Barcelona cores, but there are still two question marks: who will win the server (OLTP, Warehouse) and virtualization benchmarks? We will find out in a few weeks.

AMD also launched their B3 23xx series, but frankly, we are disappointed that AMD's fastest quad-core is still only at 2.3GHz; AMD promised 2.5GHz months ago! 2.5GHz really is necessary to be competitive with Intel, who passed the 3GHz quad-core wall back in 2007. Even worse, Intel already has 50W parts at 2.5GHz. AMD is in defensive mode in the 2P market, and its only remaining weapon is aggressive pricing.

Things are looking better in the 4P market however. AMD's platform scales better, at least until Intel's Nehalem arrives - and Xeon "Nehalem" MP CPUs won't be available until 2009. In addition, AMD's newest quad-core has to compete with Intel's 65nm CPUs that are limited to 2.4GHz at 80W TDP for now. AMD has a narrow window to make a good impression in the quad socket market, ramp up clock speeds, and prepare for Intel's Dunnington in Q3. With up to 16MB L3 cache and six cores per die, Dunnington looks massive - but perhaps also a bit expensive.

We're not the only ones that have noticed AMD most likely has (we're not convinced until we see all our tests J) a competitive quad socket CPU. HP is the most enthusiastic tier-one OEM with two quad Opteron models:

• A "classic" 4U HP ProLiant DL585 G5
• A rather amazing quad socket HP ProLiant DL685 G5 blade

The fast growing blade market seems to like the third generation Opteron. As the 5000V chipset with DDR2 support is not available for the Xeon Tigerton, the latter is a bit harder to cool in a cramped blade environment. However, HP does have a quad Tigerton blade, the HP ProLiant DL680c G5 blade.

Eight blades in a 10U blade chassis (two HDs per blade) is not bad, but HPC specialist Supermicro does even better with 10 x 16 cores in a 7U enclosure (one HD per blade). Rackable, Appro, and Synnex also launch their newest Opteron models today.

According to AMD and HP, The HP ProLiant DL585 G5 set a new performance record for 4-socket, x86-based systems in TPC-C Price/tpmC, and the HP ProLiant BL685c G5 server set a new record for SPECfp_rate2006. HP's 8356 system scored 147 baseline while the best Intel based result is around 108. However, it should be noted that Specfp_rate 2006 exaggerates the importance of memory bandwidth. SPECFP2006 already runs with a rather large footprint, and if you run 16 instances in parallel....

Although the 83xx series will perform excellently in HPC, we don't believe that the difference will be this large, even in memory intensive applications. We definitely need some good independent benchmarking. Stay tuned and add http://it.anandtech.com to your bookmarks!