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Has AMD's SB700 southbridge started shipping yet? I ask because TR complains about SB600 problems here: http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/13832/5

I'd never heard of AHCI before this article so I'm not sure I care. This will be for a gaming PC. What do you think?

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Yes, I'm building myself an AMD gaming rig, because:
1) Phenom 9850 X4 is only about 10% slower than Q9300 in most apps, and that gap is smaller in most games, typically 3%.
2) I like the idea of the all-AMD system and the potential reliability of a single vendor.
3) I hate monopolies. (Intel, not to mention Microsoft and basically every power and phone company in the world.)

The 10% difference means alot less to me than the other two items. But, on the other hand, a serious AMD reliability problem would put me off of Spider.

Yes, SB700 is out on a bunch of boards. 780G motherboards all have the SB700, along with Foxconn's 780V uATX board (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813186143), all of the 740G motherboards, and the second generation of 790FX boards (SB700 came out late so the first generation was 790FX+SB600). None of the 770 or 790X boards on Newegg did though.
No AHCI means that your SATA drives won't be hot-swappable, and that you won't have native command queueing. I could live with that, but I don't know about you...

sparkman wrote:

Yes, I'm building myself an AMD gaming rig, because:
1) Phenom 9850 X4 is only about 10% slower than Q9300 in most apps, and that gap is smaller in most games, typically 3%.
2) I like the idea of the all-AMD system and the potential reliability of a single vendor.
3) I hate monopolies. (Intel, not to mention Microsoft and basically every power and phone company in the world.)

I tend to think of spider as more of a marketing thing. It's not necessarily going to be more stable or reliable, just because it's all under AMD. That being said, you can still get a kick ass gaming machine from AMD, but you can probably get a better one if you keep your options open to nvidia/intel.

Thanks, I think I want a 790FX board. That's the high-end one, right? So it sounds like I want a 2nd-gen 790FX. I'll put a 9850 X4 chip in it now, and in 18 months maybe replace it with a faster and cooler (and probably 45nm) chip when prices on the next generation have dropped. Maybe called "9950 X4" is my guess. Or "9999 X8"... hey I can hope.

Has TR reviewed the 2nd-gen 790FX's yet? Or does anyone have any recommendations?

AFAIK, there are no 790fx boards with sb700 yet. Foxconn was supposed to release one but I don't know what happened to that. I think the date is still "Q1 2008"

http://www.tweaktown.com/news/8602/foxc ... index.html

I'm sure they'll be along. But did SB700 fix AHCI?

flip-mode wrote:

I'm sure they'll be along. But did SB700 fix AHCI?

Hmmm. No, apparently they have not fixed the SB600 southbridge problems in SB700.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14261/10 wrote:

Like the SB600 before it, the SB700 appears to have problems scaling performance as the number of simultaneous I/O requests increases.

Reliability is a much bigger problem in my mind than the 2% to 10% performance gap with Intel. No matter how much I might like AMD, I won't settle for broken hardware if I don't have to. I may have to go with an Intel system, or wait for SB800.

or you could just use a different motherboard manufacturer.

sparkman wrote:

flip-mode wrote:

I'm sure they'll be along. But did SB700 fix AHCI?

Hmmm. No, apparently they have not fixed the SB600 southbridge problems in SB700.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14261/10 wrote:

Like the SB600 before it, the SB700 appears to have problems scaling performance as the number of simultaneous I/O requests increases.

Reliability is a much bigger problem in my mind than the 2% to 10% performance gap with Intel. No matter how much I might like AMD, I won't settle for broken hardware if I don't have to. I may have to go with an Intel system, or wait for SB800.

Do you NEED to have hot-swappable drives? If not, what's the problem again?

This thread is moving to the Motherboards and Chipsets forum.

JustAnEngineer
SBA forum moderator

lex-ington wrote:

Do you NEED to have hot-swappable drives? If not, what's the problem again?

No I don't care about hot-swapping and don't really even know what AHCI is.

My concern is that TR reviewed the SB700 as having installation problems with Windows Vista (critical problem in my opinion), and poor performance scaling on serial ATA (serious problem in my opinion). http://techreport.com/articles.x/14261/10

In terms of platform stability and reliability Intel chipsets are still a tad better. As I always said if Intel produces a chipset for AMD CPUs it will be the enthusiast's wet dream. Of course that will never happen even if Hell freezes over.

sparkman wrote:

flip-mode wrote:

I'm sure they'll be along. But did SB700 fix AHCI?

Hmmm. No, apparently they have not fixed the SB600 southbridge problems in SB700.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14261/10 wrote:

Like the SB600 before it, the SB700 appears to have problems scaling performance as the number of simultaneous I/O requests increases.

Reliability is a much bigger problem in my mind than the 2% to 10% performance gap with Intel. No matter how much I might like AMD, I won't settle for broken hardware if I don't have to. I may have to go with an Intel system, or wait for SB800.

Out of curiousity, where's the reliability concern? It's a performance deficiency.

sparkman wrote:

lex-ington wrote:

Do you NEED to have hot-swappable drives? If not, what's the problem again?

No I don't care about hot-swapping and don't really even know what AHCI is.

My concern is that TR reviewed the SB700 as having installation problems with Windows Vista (critical problem in my opinion), and poor performance scaling on serial ATA (serious problem in my opinion). http://techreport.com/articles.x/14261/10

If you don't need ahci, feel free to not enable it. I was able to install vista on a 780g box in ahci mode without jumping through any hoops, btw.

mattsteg wrote:

Out of curiousity, where's the reliability concern? It's a performance deficiency.

You're right. I misspoke. It's a performance deficiency in something so non-cutting-edge (disk drives) that it made me question the reliability, that's all.

mattsteg wrote:

sparkman wrote:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14261/10

If you don't need ahci, feel free to not enable it. I was able to install vista on a 780g box in ahci mode without jumping through any hoops, btw.

Why then did the TR article say installing Vista in AHCI mode would cause problems? They complained: "It's ridiculous to ask users to jump through hoops just to enable AHCI."

Not that I even want to use AHCI in Windows. I just assumed it was the default, and that I'd have to jump thru hoops to avoid AHCI to install Windows in simple IDE mode. But you are saying AHCI mode works fine?

If AHCI is not an issue for you, then this is the board for you. Turn off AHCI, turn off the on-board video and go to town.

lex-ington wrote:

If AHCI is not an issue for you, then this is the board for you. Turn off AHCI, turn off the on-board video and go to town.

Hey... I checked out the specs tab under that link and look what it says: CPU Type: Phenom FX / Phenom / Athlon 64 FX / Athlon 64 X2

Phenom FX??? Is that a typo, or does Gigabyte know something about AMD's upcoming chips that we don't? The only Phenoms I've heard of are the X3 and X4 types.

sparkman wrote:

mattsteg wrote:

sparkman wrote:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14261/10

If you don't need ahci, feel free to not enable it. I was able to install vista on a 780g box in ahci mode without jumping through any hoops, btw.

Why then did the TR article say installing Vista in AHCI mode would cause problems? They complained: "It's ridiculous to ask users to jump through hoops just to enable AHCI."

Not that I even want to use AHCI in Windows. I just assumed it was the default, and that I'd have to jump thru hoops to avoid AHCI to install Windows in simple IDE mode. But you are saying AHCI mode works fine?

I was able to install in ahci mode just fine. Also, ahci is disabled by default on most motherboards, in my experience.

lex-ington wrote:

If AHCI is not an issue for you, then this is the board for you. Turn off AHCI, turn off the on-board video and go to town.

Note: I think the GA-MA78G-DS3H mainboard supports all the Phenoms except the 9850 X4. See: http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Moth ... uctID=2800

The 9850 X4 is listed as "N/A = Not support" there. (Damn.)

sparkman wrote:

My concern is that TR reviewed the SB700 as having installation problems with Windows Vista (critical problem in my opinion), and poor performance scaling on serial ATA (serious problem in my opinion). http://techreport.com/articles.x/14261/10

I'm not sure about this, but: there's mention in the article, on that very page, of a "hotfix" that was required for Vista with SB600/700. I think this was rolled into Vista SP1 so the install issue should no longer be... an issue. Can someone fact-check me on that? You all that have installed Vista with AHCI enabled on these boards, are you using an SP1 install disc?

I won't have that particular combination of hardware/software for another month at least to find out for myself.

As for the performance issues, well, a lot has been written about it. I can't see it being an issue for most users; really, it's not like they're crawling along at pre-DMA PIO mode speeds. The first charts on this page make SB600 performance seem bad:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/11931/11

But if you look at the subsequent pages, charts and graphs you'll see that in some cases the worst you're looking at is the difference between 3ms and 5ms. Yes, it's 66% slower than 3ms. But it's 5 milliseconds.

deruberhanyok wrote:

sparkman wrote:

But if you look at the subsequent pages, charts and graphs you'll see that in some cases the worst you're looking at is the difference between 3ms and 5ms. Yes, it's 66% slower than 3ms. But it's 5 milliseconds.

just before people start scratching their heads. 1000 milli = 1 second.