Tyan Thunder K8S / AMD Opteron - BIOS and Benchmarks

The BIOS is standard Tyan fare. It's easy to navigate, and there are lots of options, but none of that crazy 'overclocking' BS. It's a standard AMI BIOS, with lots of interesting options. Every sub-menu is riddled with options, everything I can imagine (with the obious clock/voltage exceptions) is configurable to your black little heart's content. You can tweak everything from disabling individual PCI slots all the way to configuring the initial IDE detection timeout. The hardware monitoring page is fully stocked, with voltages and fan speeds galore. You can enable or disable any of the onboard components, as well. Don't like SATA? Pretend it's not there. Disable it in the BIOS and you'll never see a trace of it.

The 'chipset' submenu is fully stocked with memory controller and HT link options. I didn't understand everything here, and I like to think I'm pretty clued-up with regards to hardware. Regardless, if you ever really wanted to tweak your "HT Link 0 RZ-comp mode", The TK8S has you covered; the BIOS is stocked. The only things I could have wished for are Tyan's arch-enemies: voltage/FSB adjust and manual RAM timings. Those aren't happening though, no matter how much I whine, so we'll call it perfect and move on.

Test Configuration

	Opteron (IA32/AMD64)	Intel IA32
CPU	Dual AMD Opteron 246 (2.0GHz, 128K L1, 1MB L2 cache)	Dual Xeon 3.2A (3.2GHz, ~16K L1, 512 L2, 1024KB L3 cache)
Chipset	AMD 8000 series (AMD-8131 PCI-X tunnel and AMD-8111 I/O controller	Intel E7505
Memory	3GB (6*512MB) PC3200 EL registered ECC	1GB (2*512MB) PC2700 registered ECC
Storage	WD400BB	WD400JB 'SE'
OS	Windows 2003 Enterprise Server (AMD64) / Windows 2003 Enterprise Server (IA32)	Windows 2003 Enterprise Server (IA32)

OCZ was kind enough to provide the registered/ECC DDR for our Opteron test system. We originally received 2GB of PC3200 (4x 512MB) from them but because of a shipping snafu, we received another 2GB a short time later. We told them about the mistake but they were kind enough to let us keep all 4GB. It really worked out given that a lot of Opteron boards have more than four dimm slots. We can't forget about Crucial either as they did supply the 1GB of registered/ECC DDR used in our Xeon test system.

What benchmarks did we decide on for our first Opteron review?

Memory Benchmarks