Motherboards

The MSI K8N Platinum SLI is a cost effective alternative to the DFI LanParty. Although the overall performance may be marginally lower, the MSI is still a great motherboard. Moreover by omitting several of the more frivolous benefits such as the PC carrying strap, or Front X ports, the K8N saves you about $50. Likewise, there are non-overlapping talents to these two boards – the MSI has more SATA-II ports than the competition, a PCI-e based 2nd GigE port, and the integrated SB Live 24-bit.

Going to a non-SLI nForce4 might save you a few extra bucks also, but I probably would stay away from that since it limits your upgrade options. You might not be interested in SLI now, but what happens in the next generation?

For an SLI-based dual Opteron workstation, we like the Tyan Thunder K8WE if you need PCI-X. It is expensive, but that’s the admission price for a dual-socket 940 system with dual PCIe and a full complement of PCI-X slots. The other motherboard we were very tempted to use was the Supermicro H8DCE workstation board. Like the K8WE, it is one of the few Dual Opteron boards with dual PCI-express 16x slots for SLI performance. However, by forgoing the PCI-X support, Supermicro is able to enable eight SATA-II ports. The best part is that it’s available for only $360. We haven’t taken a look at this board in our labs yet, but given Supermicro’s history, we would anticipate it to be a superb performer. The big problem of course is that Supermicro does not officially acknowledge the H8DCE as a retail board. Like the original “white box” K7 boards from ASUS, Supermicro is afraid to disappoint long-time partner Intel. Politics aside, the real problem is that this makes it very difficult to find BIOS updates for the H8DCE, and technical support will be handled by the reseller rather than the manufacturer. Right now, Supermicro simply has 3 FAQ items for the H8DCE and they don’t show up unless you search for it.

The available options for a dual Opteron workstation with a single PCIe slot include ASUS’s K8N-DL for just $300. If you did not need SLI (which you’ll be able to figure out after seeing tomorrow’s articles), the ASUS is a great bargain.