Greetings, The single K7 boards may well have problems (I haven't tested those as extensively), however, the Tiger, and the newer Thunder revision (the one with a heatsink glued to the northbridge) seem capable of being quite solid once the bum boards are screened out. They are very touchy about their power. I'm rejecting >20% of the power supplies I get due to instability which develops after several hours at 100% CPU. Anything less stressful than that and they seem fine. It makes testing hard. Just to keep things nice and confusing, the P.S. problem looks a lot like a flaky mainboard. Once I get a good supply in the system, and keep it in a cool room with good airflow, they work great.
The airflow is as important as the temperature. A rack of these things will form a 'bubble' of hot air around them even in a perfectly cool room unless they get direct airflow. A proper datacenter environment is more than adequate. G'day, sjames Quoting Ronald G Minnich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > lotsa people having trouble with K7s nowadays. > > I don't buy the altitude argument. I buy the "K7 mainboards are poorly > engineered" argument, personally, given my trouble with K7s on four > different motherboards at this point. I also have a friend with a > 32-node > cluster with conventional BIOS and K7SEM mainboards -- it has frequent > strange memory system problems that look like "flaky mainboard". > > PIII looks better all the time. > > ron > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2002 09:50:25 +0800 > Subject: Re: bummer! > > I met another guy today with K7's that crash when doing heavy numerical > computations (like mine). His a Tyan boards. Also Duals. His > motherboard > is the newer "tiger" board and mine is the previous (which was new when > I > bought it) "thunder" motherboard. his are 1.6Ghz mine are 1.2Ghz. > > I think its the altitude. lower air flow plus lower thermal transport. > I keep mine in a refrigerated room so its not the input air > temperature. > The output temperature is quite warm. > > -- > > > ----------------------------steven james, director of research, linux labs LinuxBIOS Cluster Solutions 230 peachtree st nw ste 2705 High-Speed Colocation, Hosting, atlanta.ga.us 30303 Linux Hardware, Development & Support http://www.linuxlabs.com * Visit us at SuperComputing 2002, Booth 1441 * office/fax 404.577.7747/3 --------------------------------------------------------------------------
