Disruptor wrote on 2023-04-18, 21:30:
Yes, but however they lacked of the instruction CMPXCHG16B. So they were 64bit processors, but they were limited to Windows x64 8.0 and EOL on other Windows x64 with Microsofts patches first.
Well if the issue can't be bypassed I guess Windows 7 will have to do for testing newer stuff! 😁
I remember reading something about this instruction somehow causing issues for some people with much newer CPUs when Windows 8.1 rolled out.
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I spent yesterday evening hunting parts in my basement and attic.
So far I have found.
MSI K8T Master2-FAR. The last time this motherboard was in action was in May 2015 benching Doom 3 for the Doom3 performance thread, I hope it still works.
2x Opteron 248. These are the CPUs I used for the Doom 3 benchmarking. I also found 2x Opteron 250 (0.13um).
I have not found any of my boxes with decent AGP cards from the correct era but I did find two Radeon 9800 Pro, one without a cooler and one with the cooler unattached. I think they are from a scrap lot I bought but I don't remember testing them, with luck one could be persuaded to work.
It would be nice to find my spare Geforce FX5900 Ultra but if I don't I do know in which system the other one is located.
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My main worry at the moment is the multiplier control. I'm at work reading up on issues people had with the MSI K8T Master2-FAR back in 2003. As the board supports the Athlon FX in single CPU mode I figured the board has multiplier control so I would be able to underclock the Opteron 248 from 2.2GHz to 1.8GHz (the speed of the 244). Now I read that at the time of the release of the Athlon FX51 MSI had not implemented multiplier control in the BIOS and I have no clue if they later did. I never had any reason to change multiplier with this board as I do not own a s940 FX CPU and the Opterons multipliers can't be increased. Perhaps lowering the multiplier can be solved with some "Cool and Quiet" software.
In the worst case I will just have to Ebay a couple of Opteron 244.
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Edit:
I just caved and ordered 2x Opteron 244 for a totally unreasonable 45 euro shipped... The "real value" is ~2 euro each so money well spent... It's for science! 😁
The 248 is probably a better "bin" of the Sledgehammer core compared to the 244 available at launch so this way we will (in theory) get more accurate overclocking numbers. In the real world the overclocking with all of these CPUs on this motherboard will be limited by the small amount it's possible to increase the reference clock. If I remember right the BIOS does support locking the PCI and AGP-bus but early steppings of the VIA-chipset doesn't!
These CPUs won't be here in time for the weekend but that won't stop me from getting the K8-system up and running as long as the motherboard still works. I guess I will have to start the benchmarking with some of the competing platforms if I can't lower the multiplier with the Opteron 248.
I just noticed that the official launch date seems to be the 22th of April 2003 and not the 23th (the date Anandtech posted their review). Not that this matters much 😁
New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.