steve17323

Thanks. Unfortunately this board doesnt have the short PCIe X1 slot. It has on PCI 32bit slot bewteen the PCIe x16 slots and 3 PCI X slots. 2 @ 100Mhz and 1 @ 133Mhz. Which slot would you reccomend? If these interfaces are too slow I might have to use one one of the X16 slots and just run a bigger single GPU

I recently came into possession of a Tyan Thunder S2895 K8WE Motherboard from a buddy of mine. Its a dual CPU board with 2 AMD Opteron processors. Although it's an older board, it came with both CPUs, heat sinks, fans, and 16 Gigs of RAM. The chips are Opteron 285s. After testing the board to make sure it powered on, I decided I want to do a retro build. The board does have some options and that's where my questions come in. I do a lot of game building, 3D rendering, and creation. Primarily I use CryEngine and do a lot of work with 3DS Max, Maya, Mudbox, World Machine, PhotoShop, ect. I also do video editing. I know I'll be running an SLI setup, probably a pair of 1050s, an SSD for the OS (Win 7), and a RAID 3 setup. I want to add USB 3.0 and SATA III capability per PCI adapter cards. The board has SCSI and although I'm not familiar with it I am trying to learn what I can. One question I have is am i better using SCSI rather then RAID 3? I want to use RAID to stripe the drives for the speed and have some backup options, even if its with an external USB drive for a backup. Will I get the same speed using SCSI drives instead? I see most people using SCSI are using smaller (75 - 100 GB) high speed (10 - 15k rpm) drives. I'm having a hard time trying to find out the difference between SCSI drives and regular HDD in a RAID configuration. Do you think I'm better off using RAID or SCSI in order to get the speed that multiple drives in RAID 3 offers? The CPU and GPU intensive programs i want to run on an SSD with the operating system. Should I just run it on a single SSD, RAID 3 with mechanical HDDs, or a SCSi configuration? I want to add a PCI adapter card that will give me USB 3.0 which I will use for a backup external drive, and SATA III for the SSD and RAID. The board has 2 RAID controllers, but will I see a noticeable difference using the newer SATA III ports from the adapter card? I included the PDF manual for the motherboard so you guys can see all the specs. I'm also wondering what slots should be used for which adapter cards. There's the 2 PCIe x16 slots for SLI (prob be running single slot cards because there's a 32 bit PCI slot between them). Then there's 2 PCI X slots @ 100Mhz, and one PCI X slot at the bottom @ 133 Mhz. Next question, which of these slots should be used if adding 1 USB 3.0 adapter card and 1 SATA 3 adapter card. Obviously if I run dual slot GPUs (GTX 1050) I'll only have the 2 bottom slots open. Another question, I've read that the BIOS can only support up to Win 7 which doesn't bother me, but I'll lose Direct X 12 functionality, so how much of an impact would that have running a PCIe 3.0 card in a PCIe 2.0 slot? Should i just go with a 2.0 DX11 card(s)? If i go the SCSI route that will open up a slot so i can run a sound card that I have (Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-FI). That would give me 7.1 Digital surround vs the integrated analog codec on the board. I'm also considering running RAID on 2 SSDs instead of 3 HDD depending on the cost and performance difference. i'm looking forward to this build as i like projects like this. I hope that I what I am asking i was able to make clear enough in this post rather then just confusing you guys, but please dont hesitate to ask. Any info you guys can offer will be greatly appreciated. looking forward to your opinions. Thanks!! So to clarify: #1. Is a RAID configuration faster in SCSI or SATA II? and what are the pros / cons ? #2. Is it worth upgrading to SATA III speed wise and can it be achieved in PCI X slots? #3. Wanting to stripe across 3 mechanical hard drives in RAID 3, for the speed advantage, is it better to just use 2 SSDs instead? #4. Can the latest PCIe 3.0 cards be used in this board even though its limited to Win 7 w/ DX 11? #5 Which slots would you put which adapter cards in? (USB 3.0 and SATA 3) Tyan Thunder K8WE S2895 Motherboard 2 AMD Opteron 285 Dual Core 64 bit Processors 2.6Ghz 2MB L2 cache 8 2048MB GenStar ATP PC3200 ECC REG DDR RAM modules (16 GB) m_s2895_101.pdf