8 Cores for ~$500

About a year ago, I found a pair of AMD Opteron 8346HE quad-core 1.8GHz CPUs on eBay for about $150. They suffered from AMD's TLB bug with the Barcelona core, but since that bug only seems to affect virtualized workloads, I decided to pick them up anyways. Granted, virtualizing with 8 cores would be nice, but regardless, I couldn't resist such a great price for two quad-core chips. At the time, dual socket F motherboards, ECC RAM, etc. were too expensive to complete the rest of the machine, so I shelved the chips until now.

I finally found the right motherboard at the right price for my machine, an MSI K9ND Speedster2. This board has a couple distinct advantages: first, it's ATX-sized, so I don't need an Extended ATX case (in fact, I chose an Antec 300, my second of that particular case). Second, it's still got 8 RAM slots, so I can go up to 32GB if I ever felt like spending that much money on 4GB ECC sticks (right now, it sits at 4GB, which I'll probably bump up to 8GB now that I know the machine and its parts all work). The third advantage of this particular board is price: I picked it up on eBay for only $86 shipped, new from MSI, with the updated 8Mb BIOS chip that supports quad core Socket F CPUs.

I bought the motherboard and ordered the rest of the parts (a power supply, the RAM, and two CPU coolers) from NewEgg before I left for Winter Break, and unfortunately the motherboard didn't come before I flew out of Rochester (which, admittedly, is a good thing as it would have certainly led to me neglecting my finals had I been able to build the machine). So, the first thing I did when I got back to Rochester was scramble to build my new machine. The Antec 300 case is a delight to work with, and the hardest part of assembly was attaching the CPU coolers. Even that didn't take long, so I then proceeded to install a fresh copy of Gentoo Linux (what better distro for taking advantage of 8 cores, right?). The install was hampered only by my slow internet connection in my dorm, and once it was complete, I had a freshly-compiled install sitting, waiting for me to take advantage of my 14.4GHz of slightly-tarnished (see the TLB bug) computing power, which is easier said than done. I haven't yet really found a use for all that power, so it's currently sitting idle. Maybe it's a good thing I'm taking a course on parallel and distributed systems this semester.

Pictures of the “rig” are available over at [H]ardForum.

Posted 02:34 PM