The following is an extract of a recent e-mail exchange between Paul Dutton and myself. We decided that this topic might be of interest to others so herewith an edited versionof my enquiry and Pauls response:-
Quote
Paul,
I am now considering upgrading my RT 2000 dedicated Intel bx440 600 Meg system and have been
watching your articles on the BB about Dual AMD mobos.
Recognising how temperamental the RT 2000 can be with some mobos I wondered
if you had had time to do any tests with the latest dual Athlon mobos with
the latest RT 2000 software (MVT 3 SP1 Final) and if so do you have any
recommendations?.
Response
Mike,
Thanks for your email.
The short answer is I have tested Matrox RT2500 on the almost excellent TYAN
Thunder K7 S2462 and have encountered no issues.
Fyfi my test system has utilised both Matrox Millennium G450 32MB Dual-Head
and NVIDIA Quadro2 Pro display adapters, Creative SoundBlaster Live! audio
and I have utilised both single Ultra-ATA/66 and 100 storage for Video and
in a three drive RAID 0 array with various Ultra-ATA RAID controllers.
However unless you want the integrated Adaptec dual-channel Ultra160 SCSI my
advice is that within a month cheaper dual processor mainboards from TYAN
and others will be available and at that snapshot in time the
price/performance killer spec may well be dual 1GHZ AMD Duron (Morgan Core
only); these mainboards will also have 64-bit 66MHz PCI as opposed to 64-bit
33MHz on the Thunder K7 and 64-bit 66MHz PCI devices should start to become
popular circa Q2 2002...
Hope this helps.
As I said please post this all up for the wider audience.
Cheers,
Paul
Unquote
I have since asked Paul if he is intending to do any tests on the old RT 2000 card as I was not intending to upgrade my RT quite so soon. I had hoped to take advantage of the software optimisation for dual procs that Matrox have included in their latest SP1. for the RT2000. This update is FOC for registered owners.
Mike