Introduction

A few years ago, AMD introduced us to their powerhouse Opteron line of CPUs.  Needless to say, it featured numerous technological goodies that made us power users drool with glee.  Their counterparts in Santa Clara found themselves in a battle of brains vs brawn, displacement vs forced induction, size/girth vs... well, you get the picture.  AMD's homegrown x86-64 instruction set alone proved too much for Intel, forcing the teacher to learn something from its longtime student.  Before long, x86-64 instructions were to be supported in Intel processors as well.  Clock speed alone no longer equated to performance.

So goes the workstation-class CPU saga that we hope would never end.  The rookie Opteron became an instant hit with the dual-proc crowd.  Initially, AMD launched their own 8000-series chipset, but performance issues abound, especially with the AGP tunnel and certain high-end graphics cards that users longed to pair up with their Opterons.

Eventually, nVidia released the NF3 Pro/250 chipset with support for two Opteron processors.  Everyone rejoiced, eagerly awaiting the first crop of dual-Opty NF3 Pro/250 workstation boards to hit the market.  After the ever-increasing success of the NF2 family in the Socket-A arena, hopes were high that NF3 Pro/250-based boards would deliver ultimate performance to the OSA2xx users.  In this article, we will examine and measure the performance of the best-known dual-Opteron NF3 Pro/250 board marketed in the USA - the Iwill DK8N.

Because Opteron boards do not have a traditional chipset-based "northbridge", memory performance isn't expected to differ much from other dual-Opteron boards.  However, the AGP tunnel issues that those boards suffered are not at all present in the NF3 chipset.  We would like to see how much performance we can get out of two Opterons.

Before we begin, we would like to tell you that this article was made possible by the following sponsors and people, in alphabetical order:  Charlie, Jack, and Tony.

Processor	Dual AMD Opteron 940-pin CPUs
	Three HyperTransport Links
	1600MT/s for each link (or 3.2GB/s in each direction)
	Two 940-pin sockets
Chipset	nVidia nForce3 250 Pro
	AMD 8131 PCI-X Tunnel
	Winbond 83627 THF SuperIO
System Memory	Dual Channel DDR400/333
	4+4 DIMMs, up to 16GB
	ECC Registered memory modules only
Audio	Realtek ALC655
	6-Channel audio
	SPDIF output, Line-In, Line-Out, Mic at rear panel
Ethernet	Gigabit (10/100/1000 Mb/s) nVidia MAC
	RJ45 connector at Rear Panel
USB 2.0	Eight USB 2.0 ports
	4x Rear Panel
	4x internal on motherboard
IEEE 1394	Two IEEE 1394 ports
	One 6-pin at Rear Panel
	One 6-pin internal on motherboard
Serial ATA	Six SATA ports
	Two SATA ports connected to NF3 Pro/250
	Four SATA ports connected to Silicon Image SiI3114 RAID Controller (RAID levels 0, 1, 0+1)
Expansion Slots	AGP Pro 8x
	1x PCI-X 64 bit / 133MHz or 2x PCI-X 64-bit 100MHz
	2x PCI-X 64-bit / 66MHz
	1x PCI 32-bit / 33MHz
Legacy IO	PS/2 mouse and keyboard with wake-up function
	1x 34-pin FDD connector
	2x 40-pin IDE connectors supporting ATA-133/100/66/33 transfers
	1x DB25 parallel port with ECP/EPP support
	1x DB9 RS-232 serial port with 16550 UART
Form Factor	Extended ATX
	12" x 13"
Power Connectors	EPS-12V
	24-pin + 8-pin
List Price	US$509
Lowest Online Price	US$445