Sneak peek: Dual-core Opterons vs E6700 on 8800GTX
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 06 Dec 2006

Did you ever wonder how high-end dual-core Opterons would handle 8800GTX in a typical workstation 3D gaming environment? Well, we've had the idea to test this for more then a month now, and we gotta tell you this was quite a challenge. We only did some basic checkups with a couple of standard tests because - quite frankly - the motherboard used for the review still doesn't have an offical BIOS that supports SLI with 8800GTX's, plus we were severely time-limited. But, stories later, let's cut to the chase...

First and foremost - introduction. We've been in pretty good contacts with Tyan in the last couple of years, especially after all of the "ABIT server part went to XY and then to Tyan" thing. We highly rate this company as a leader in the server/workstation motherboard segment, where their products have always been like these things we always wanted to play with, but didn't get the chance. All of that changed in 2005 and right now, with three S2895 motherboards, we really have loads of experience with this motherboard. We also used this motherboard when we were in the "Does multimonitor support work with SLI and nForce Professional" phase, as stated here.

So, the problem with this motherboard is the BIOS that doesn't (YET!) support 8800GTX in SLI mode. There's this alpha pre-BIOS that we installed on one of our motherboards and lost the motherboard in shadows of "I don't want to cooperate anymore" state. So, we weren't about to give up on more of our motherboards just to try and see if this will work so - we decided to cut ourselves some slack and install one 8800GTX and see how this thing compares to our usual testing setup - EVGA 680i-based motherboard, Intel's Core 2 Duo E6700, WD's RaptorX, OCZ's memory and PSU. The rest of the setup was the same except for memory - memory was a mixture of OCZ and Transcend in 2x2x512MB DDR400 configuration. AMD was kind enough to send us a couple of their high-end dual-core Opterons for 2P (model 285, dual-core at 2.6GHz, Socket 940, of course) and we were ready to go.

Just to have everything on paper, here is a complete list of hardware used on our two testbeds, referred as "E6700" and "2xO285" or "2xOpteron 285".

E6700 testbed:
- EVGA 680i-based motherboard
- Intel Core 2 Duo X6700
- OCZ 2x1GB Platinum XTC DDR2-1000 (running at standard 800 MHz)
- WD RaptorX
- ASUS EN8800GTX
- OCZ's PowerStream and ModStream PSU's
- Dell 3007 30" LCD

Dual Opteron testbed:
- Tyan S2895 motherboard
- two AMD Opterons 285 (dual-core, 2.6GHz) - OCZ and Transcend's 2x512MB memory, 2GB overall - WD RaptorX
- ASUS EN8800GTX
- Fortron's 460W EPS PSU + OCZ's ModStream
- Dell 3007 30" LCD