Ken Teh said...
|
|On Wed, 23 Aug 2006, John Haggerty wrote:
|
|> We are running a substantial cluster of SL3.0.5 machines as part of a data 
|> acquisition system, and we thought it would be nice to upgrade the 
|> interactive machines we use to control it all, so we bought a couple of nice 
|> dual Opteron machines (I think they sport the Navion-T PCI express 
|> motherboard) and a PNY Verto GeForce 7900 GT PCIe x16 graphics adapter for 
|> supporting two monitors.  We'd really like the same software environment as 
|> the rest of the cluster, but there are some early indications that this 
|> configuration is a little too far out for 3.0.5.
|>
|> Anyone with experience or advice or pointers about where to look for help?

I don't know about the mobos, but dual Opterons with 3.0.4
and 3.0.5 seem to be no problem at all.  Ours get flogged
hard, and they just run.  I think we've had two lockups on
one system, out of 8.  Some of those are at least two years
old.

|I'd like to hear some discussion on this as well.  The one thing I'd worry 
|about is the graphics card.  The general impression I get from my readings 
|is that the vendor's driver is not as good as the nv driver that is 
|delivered with a stock SL distro.  The NV driver explicitly lists support 
|up to the 6600.  The newer 7x00 are not listed.  I've ordered a 7300 and 
|gambling that the nv driver will support the card.

For basic dual head, if you don't need serious speed or 3D,
the Matrox cards are wonderful.  We're still running a bunch
of G450s.  (If anyone can point me to performance comparisons
of the G550 and P650 vs the G450, I would appreciate it; there
doesn't seem to be much on the web in this vein!)  We use the
Matrox drivers, and everything works beautifully, albeit slowly
(esp. with GL).

The only nVidia dual head we've tried is a Jaton MX4000Twin.
The nv driver works very well for most things, but we needed
GL for one of the Cadence tools, and ended up having to install
the nvidia driver from their site.  It had some other issues.
These work fine for us in single head mode. 8^/

We've also tried an Asus 9250 (ATI) with one RGB and one DVI
out (one CRT, one flatpanel LCD).  Again, we had to load ATI's
proprietary driver.  It mostly works, but again 3D bit us;
the GL support only extends up to a certain screen size, which
is about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way across the second monitor.  If
any part of a window is past that point, no GL works within
that window.

-Miles