Socket FM2 is (almost) there

[Dirk Broer]

FM2 ATX boards Review from Tom's Hardware.
Tom agrees with me on most favorite boards -The ASUS F2A85-V PRO and the Asrock FM2A85 Extreme 6-, but for more elaborate reasons. As he states "Asus provides the best overclocking on its exorbitantly-priced F2A85-V Pro, while ASRock offers the best price on its FM2A85X Extreme6, which doesn't overclock as well. Charting performance-per-dollar might it easier for some folks to choose a winner, but we also need to discuss the feature set each platform offers at its price point."


So what makes the Asrock FM2A85 Extreme 6 tick, according to Tom?
* It had the highest number (10) of phases in the voltage regulator module (like i wrote: The power design has a 8+2 phase VRM. BTW: As has the Biostar HI-Fi A85X, but their board was not included in the review). ECS is the only one here to stick out with it's mere five phases.
* It had a shared highest number of PCIe-16 slots, 3 (x16/x0/x4 or x8/x8/x4). MSI and ECS fail a bit here, 'only' offering two (x16/x0 or x8/x8), and thus limiting a cruncher to a triple APU/HD 6670 setup. But the cruncher can also decide to fit in two HD 7790s, or better.
* It has a shared highest number of fan pinout points (6).
* It has a diagnostics panel (as have the Gigabyte and Sapphire boards).
# It has the best sound chip (together with the Biostar HI-Fi A85X)

And what might be the unique selling points of the ASUS F2A85-V PRO?
* It had a shared highest number of PCIe-16 slots, 3 (x16/x0/x4 or x8/x8/x4).
* It's fan pinout points (5) are all 4-pin. (as with the Gigabyte mobo)
* It is the best overclockable board in the review.

[Dirk Broer]

While Trinity is hardly out of it's diapers, AMD will release it's successor, Richland somewhere in the latter half of 2013.

[NeoGen]

And I saw on Tom's Hardware that the Radeon 8000 series is going to be delayed probably until end of this year

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Rad...000,20979.html

[Dirk Broer]

And AMD needs a new series of cards to keep up with the 600-series from nVidia, that has made an impressive leap in the Flop/Watt ratio
(luckily the DP performance of the 600-series stinks to high heaven, especially the top models when compared with their AMD competitors).
But in the meantime I am waiting for the rumoured HD 7790 to come out.

[vaughan]

My son managed to get our latest box running Linux to play happily with the AMD drivers so we have a 7900 series card running Milkywayathome now. I cannot recall if its a 7950 or 7970 and remote login from my Win 7 notebook to a Gentoo box is something I don't know how to do.
The CPU in rack10 (original name huh?) is, dare I say it, an Intel I5-3570K. They are fast, overclock well, run cooler than Sandy Bridge and are reasonably priced. The mobo is an Asrock Z77 Extreme9, 32GB Corsair vengeance 1600 low profile ram, Corsair 860W platinum p/s, Corsair 80i water cooling. Norco-470 4U server rack case. Lots of Noctua fans to keep it cool and quiet!!!
The plan is to eventually get a second AMD gpu in there so we have a descent modern BOINC gobbler I mean cruncher.

[Dirk Broer]

On the other end of the graphical spectrum my son reports that his AGP HD 3850 can no longer can contribute to Boinc.
Anytime the GPU gets started (for Moo! or Collatz) his systems reboots spontaniously.

[Jason1478963]

On the other end of the graphical spectrum my son reports that his AGP HD 3850 can no longer can contribute to Boinc.
Anytime the GPU gets started (for Moo! or Collatz) his systems reboots spontaniously.

It could be something is failing like the power supply. If its a few years old they sometimes develop bad caps and have trouble with bigger loads. Its something that is fairly easy to swap out to test.

[AMDave]

My advice is to lay off the Catalyst 13.1 and 13.2 beta drivers for linux.
They are not stable even on clean fully updated installs.
I have found 4 repeatable issues - 3 are boot killers and one is an Xrandr issue that prevents you from using multiple monitors on multiple GPUs.
The first was Plymouth crash.
The second was Compiz.
The third was Xrandr.
And the finale is complete spontaneous system crash and freeze while the screen is blanked after specified time of no activity.
That was enough for me after about 20 install iterations ( Nutz? Yes. well I was testing after all )
The last 4 days have been memorable.
I have rolled back to Catalyst 12.10 and things are playing nicely again.
A quick web search finds much evidence of the same sorts of symptoms being experienced in the wild.
The Xrandr issue is just annoying. There could be a workaround for it, but I could only get both monitors on separate GPUs to activate if I enabled Xinerama, but when I did so, the system only reported 1 GPU installed and available to programs even though both monitors are working from separate GPUs.

I did also exercise the Catalyst 13.1 driver for the older HD cards on one box. Same sort of initial issues but the killer was the spontaneous lock-ups again.
Back to the generic OSS driver on that box as 12.10 does not work on it.

I actually hope that they 'pull' that version of the linux driver from their site. There's just to much bad going on with it.

edit - important note - I did not test the 32 bit versions of the drivers, only the 64 bit versions. I don't have sufficient reason to test 32 bit anymore.

[Dirk Broer]

While Trinity is hardly out of it's diapers, AMD will release it's successor, Richland somewhere in the latter half of 2013.

And the good news is that Richland has the Radeon HD 8000 series aboard, capable -like the FirePro APUs- of double precision, so you can have yourself a very low-cost and efficient cruncher by buying the 65 Watt A10-6700 APU and get a MilkyWay capable card (both Double Precision and OpenCL) for free. Now to find out what the best Radeon card is to run alongside Richland, or save for that HD 7790 anyway...

[Dirk Broer]

And just now when Richland is launched, details about Kaveri leak out. There's good news and there is bad.
The good news is that the GPU performance of Kaveri will be in the HD 7770-7790 region.

The bad news is that it comes with a new chipset series(A68/A78/A88X) and a new Socket, FM2+.
We lucky sods however can keep dropping our Trinity or Richland APUs in Socket FM2+,
but you can't drop a Kaveri in the present FM2 boards as Kaveri uses two more pins..