PROJECT: THE ULTIMATE HIGH-DEFINITION HOME THEATER SERVER

Selected Hardware Components

MOTHERBOARD, CPU, MEMORY:

There are dozens of combinations available here.  Plenty of time and effort had been spent on testing, researching, and finally deciding on the platform suitable for this project.  It boiled down to the performance of the CPUs we had available at the time:

So it looks like our Opteron 285s may be put to use again.  The Clovertowns offer twice as many cores, but at a significantly lower clock speed.  Furthermore, we currently do not have any waterblocks for these Xeons.  Our final decision is to go with the AMD Opteron 285s,  and 2GB of Crucial DDR400 ECC Registered memory.  In this application, more cores do not necessarily mean more performance.  Four very fast cores should be more than enough.

Here is the summary on the AMD Opteron 285:

2.6GHz 90nm manufacturing process Integrated 128-bit DDR-400 controller ECC DRAM protection 16x16 HT @ 1GHz x86 and AMD64/x64 compatibility 64k/64k L1 data/instruction cache 1MB L2 cache, ECC 12 integer / 17 floating point pipeline stages 16k global history counter entries MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3 Cool 'n Quiet

AMD offers updated Cool 'n Quiet drivers for most OSes.  When the CPU is idle, this driver throttles down CPU speed by lowering the CPU multiplier to 5x, and lowering the voltage as well.  In the case of the Opteron 285, full clock speed is 2600MHz, and the voltage at that speed is 1.35v.  When idle, C'nQ brings the speed down to 1000MHz, and the voltage to 1.1v. 

AMD has a utility called Power Monitor.  It shows clock speed, voltage, core usage in percent, and relative power savings shown in the green/yellow/red bar graphs.  See images below...

AMD offers a utility called the "Dual Core Optimizer" for use with dual-core processors.  When installed, a green AMD-logo systray icon appears as shown below.  When set to "Gaming Mode", the obvious effect is that all cores are brought to full clock speed.  Any other behind-the-scenes optimization is not immediately apparent.   

As for memory, our objective is maximum stability, not overclockability or fancy LEDs.  We decided to utilize nothing but the cream of the memory crop - Crucial ECC Registered DDR-400 DIMMs.  To attain 2GB, we need four 512MB sticks.  Performance of all DDR-400 ECC Registered DIMMs are pretty much the same across different brands (within 2% in memtest86 scores), as long as timings are kept constant.  Therefore the only key differentiators between brands which would affect a purchasing decision would be the reliability, longevity, and support a manufacturer would provide for their product.  Crucial offers lifetime warranties on these modules, and they have a reputation for being one of the foremost names in server-grade, ultra-solid memory products.  Just to be sure, we continuously and repeatedly ran memtest86 on these modules using standard timings, enabling all the ECC tests.  After a couple days and a few kilowatts of power, not a single error! 

The motherboard proved to be one of the most difficult choices to make. 

Moving on to the Asus K8N-DL.  By now, we should be familiar with the performance of the K8N-DL's nForce Professional chipset.  With the latest drivers and BIOS, the K8N-DL also supports NUMA, providing additional memory bandwidth as long as a pair of DIMMs are installed on each CPU's memory interface.  Here are the specs of the K8N-DL:

Dual Socket 940 for AMD Opteron 2xx and 8xx nForce Professional 2200 6x dual-channel DDR slots, maximum 24GB DDR-400 12" x 10.5" ATX form factor 2x PCI 32/33 slots 1x PCIe x16 slot 1x PCIe x1 slot 4x SATA through nF 2200 4x SATA through Silicon Image 3114 RAID chip 2x 40-pin PATA ports 1x 34-pin FDD port 2x 1394 ports 10x USB 2.0 ports Realtek ALC850 8-channel audio with SPDIF RCA and TOSLINK outputs Broadcom BCM5751 Gigabit Ethernet 24+8 pin ATX SSI power connectors PS/2 keyboard and mouse 15-pin game port DB9 serial port DB25 parallel port

Here are images of the POST and BIOS configuration setting screens:

Default POST Image:

Standard POST Image:

Boot Menu:

K8N-DL BIOS Setup screens:

Note how Asus allows the 200MHz memory clock to be adjustable up to 400MHz.  Furthermore, memory timings are adjustable as well, and so are the DDR, chipset, CPU, and HT voltages.

Other Options:

If gaming was a concern, we would have gone with the king of the hill, Tyan Thunder K8WE S2895A2NRF.  The block diagram below shows how all the slots and ports are connected.   If the nF 2050 and the AMD8131 chips can be disabled at the hardware level ala jumper (effectively eliminating all the ports and devices connected to them), that would allow users to keep using this very powerful board but save a couple dozen watts of power.

Thunder K8WE Retail Box contents:

Thunder K8WE Rear Ports:

DB9 Serial Port | PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse | RJ45 + 2x USB 2.0 | RJ45 + 2x USB 2.0 | 1394 | Audio

Here are the specs on the S2895 as shown on the Tyan website:

The K8WE only has one PATA port, a disadvantage to those with multiple PATA drives.  There is no SPDIF audio output either, and the heatsinks on the three main chips become very hot during use.  Active cooling should have been used.  However, Tyan included convenient pushbutton POWER, RESET, and CLEAR CMOS buttons on the motherboard. 

When using two graphics cards in SLI, this is the bridge connector that would be used, the Tyan M5000:

The Thunder K8WE also comes in the SCSI-enabled version, the S2895UA2NRF.  It includes a two-channel Ultra320 SCSI controller, the LSI Logic 53C1030.  Unfortunately, there are no RAID functions available:

Thunder K8WE BIOS Setup screens: