The Blog of Ben Rockwood

Athlon64 X2

28 Nov '05 - 03:41 by benr

My new workstation, which replaces the Ultra 20, is up and running. Installed B27a and what do we see?

# psrinfo -v
Status of virtual processor 0 as of: 11/28/2005 01:23:16
  on-line since 11/28/2005 01:21:44.
  The i386 processor operates at 2211 MHz,
        and has an i387 compatible floating point processor.
Status of virtual processor 1 as of: 11/28/2005 01:23:16
  on-line since 11/28/2005 01:21:48.
  The i386 processor operates at 2211 MHz,
        and has an i387 compatible floating point processor.

Dual Core at work. The system has a 2.2Ghz Athlon64 X2 processor with 2G of OCZ 2T dual channel memory on a MSI K8N SLI Platinum motherboard. Currently I'm running a single eVGA 6800GT and using a 40GB Western Digital Raptor (10K RPM) SATA drive for OS's. A 300GB Segate SATA drive follows up with mass storage for old and large data.

One thing I like about the MSI boards is that if you (bleh) install Windows you can use their Live Update software which can download and install BIOS (and driver) updates without the need to boot a floppy. This is both convienent and far less frightening than the horrible DOS interface you have on the floppy updaters which bombard you with lots of "THE FOLLOWING PROCCESS WILL REDUCE YOUR EXPENSIVE SYSTEM INTO A USELESS PILE OF JELLO!!! PROCEED? (Y/N)" No pain, no fuss, just a clean update and your off. As much as I loath Windows, this does make having a small partition with it installed at least not entirely pointless.

The system works well, thus far with only one minor issue... Xorg in B27a does not dig my video card. I have not thus far gotten X to work, which blows. I was going to install Gentoo Linux on the partition instead but frankly its hard to give up all those kick ass features in Solaris, I don't really want to run Linux at all, despite the fact that I miss Portage.

One note about the system... I highly recommend people check out the new Antec P180 case. When I first got it I was bummed out that the OCZ ModStream power supply I'd order didn't work because the cables were too short. The problem is that the P180 puts the power supply on the bottom rather than the top but does not, like the Li Lian cases, flip the mobo orientation. That means that the motherboard power headers are on the opposite side of the cases as the power supply. This means you either need extentions for your power supply or you need to use an Antec recommend supply. And, naturally, the Antec recommended supplies are, you guessed it, Antec supplies. So I've returned my OCZ supply and instead bought a Antec TruePower 2.0, and frankly, its really nice and I'm not really bummed anymore. Its not a modular supply which sucks, but reguradless its providing smooth power and has PCIe cables, several SATA cables and is well built. The cooling provided by the P180 is just exceptional because there are 2 large fans in the top corner of the case where the CPU is sitting all my itself to keep the case temps under control. Even after playing hours of intensive games I've yet to push the CPU temp over 45C even though I'm using the stock AMD supplied heatsink and cooler.

Dual Core Rules.

One note for Solaris users who might buy MSI boards for dual core. If you boot Solaris and you do not see both cores in psrinfo output then you need to update your BIOS. When I first installed B27a I was supprised that the BIOS was unsure of what proc I had, Linux showed a single proc but 2 cores, and Solaris just saw a single virtual proc. After upgrading the BIOS I then saw what I expected and what you see above, 2 cores doing what they ought to be.

- - C O M M E N T S - -
Cool. Welcome to AMD X2 Solaris world ! I have a similar machine based on 4800+ CPU and ASUS A8N-SLI, check my short review here:
[[http://stefanparvu.blogspot.com/2005/1..]]

Stefan Parvu (Email) (URL) - 28 November '05 - 04:21

Did you download the nvidia drivers for your video card?
[[http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html]]

Luke - 28 November '05 - 16:54

For my system yes, Im using Nvidia’s drivers. Make sure as well you add to your /etc/system: set halt_idle_cpus=0 to workaround a bug related with [[http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabas..]]
or better described under: [[http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread..]]

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