VRMs

Posted by John-Erik | Filed under Uncategorized

Well, there are a few:

  • Support for gobs of cache - up to 2 MB on these cartridges, in fact (mine are 1 MB).  This helps tons under load.  Also, the cache is different from regular PII/PIII off-die cache.  Where that uses 512 kB of 1/2 speed cache running on a 64 bit bus, these use 512 kB, 1 MB or 1 MB of full speed L2 cache running on a 256 bit bus - just like the ATC of the CuMine except off die.  This is the major advantage of these parts as due to the particulars of what I’ll be running on this sytem, the cache helps tons.  This is also one of the three reasons I picked the board.  (another one being that I had the CPUs already)
  • Quieter cooling.  These puppies use massive heatsinks, so cooling is by definition quieter as it requires less airflow.
  • Better hot air venting.  In the picture I’m attaching, you can see the proximity of the rear 80mm fans and the processor fans.  In fact, to install the CPU retention brackets (which are screwed directly into the chassis, btw) I had to remove the fans to get the screwdriver in.
  • It’s tons easier to fit lots of CPUs in a system.  I’m only using two, but it’s fairly trivial to put 4 or 8 on a board without much extra room relative to socket systems.  The fact that I can even put that many into a system is pretty amazing in and of itself, as regular PII/PIII/AthlonMP and Xeon (non-MP) systems I can only put two in.  Click here to see what I mean.
  • Higher reliability.  I can actually have a CPU fail without bringing the system down (although I have to shut it down to replace the CPU).  This is because of the way termination is handled in the cartridges
  • Support for the 66 MHz PCI bus and 2 GB of RAM.  Technically, the L440GX (the slot 1 cousin of this board) supports this too, as do many more recent boards, but at the time this was particularily amazing.
  • Removable VRMs offer reliability above what is normally available.  I actually have 3 VRMs in this system - one built into the system board used for PCI slots and onboard devices and two for the CPUs.  I can also choose to have the power drawn from the 5V or 12V rail depending on the VRM I install.
  • And finally, and this is another reason I got these, the geek factor.  These are behemoths, good old traditional raw horsepower that were the second and final x86 CPU iteration that could compete not just on price/performance but also on pure performance with RISC (the first being the Pentium Pro, a close cousin to these).  Not even the Opterons can compete on pure performance with big RISC boxes, but these in their hayday could and did.  Today, they’re still screamers.

Permalink | October 22nd, 2004

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply