Can I use an opteron board for my single fx-70?

[davyk]

Ok, so I got an athalon fx-70 and before I drop $400-600 on the motherbord, I need to know if I can use a dual socket Opteron mthbrd for half the price? Mind you I will only be using one processor.

 

[BaronMatrix]

Ok, so I got an athalon fx-70 and before I drop $400-600 on the motherbord, I need to know if I can use a dual socket Opteron mthbrd for half the price? Mind you I will only be using one processor.

o you can't. The chip will fit but the Opteron board uses ECC RAM. You can do the oposite, put an Opteron into a QFX mobo. Newegg has dropped the price to under $400.

Start edit
Actually it's now $369. It should get to $299 before too long.

 

[col-p-todd]

The FX board will be more then the opteron boards but the ram for the opteron boards will way more then the normal ddr2 ram. So it evens out in price.

 

[WR]

Unless you know a special board, the Opteron 2S boards don't have BIOS support for the FX-7x series processors. They also are devoid of any overclocking features which may make an FX-70 perform similarly to an FX-72 or -74.

As far as I know there is no problem with registered memory support. You can use registered/ECC memory on a Quad FX or probably even a single-socket AM2 system. Consider unbuffered memory support a feature that requires CPU and motherboard support.

 

[BaronMatrix]

Unless you know a special board, the Opteron 2S boards don't have BIOS support for the FX-7x series processors. They also are devoid of any overclocking features which may make an FX-70 perform similarly to an FX-72 or -74.

As far as I know there is no problem with registered memory support. You can use registered/ECC memory on a Quad FX or probably even a single-socket AM2 system. Consider unbuffered memory support a feature that requires CPU and motherboard support.

No you can't ECC on a non-ECC mobo. But you can use anOpteron on QFX mobo with non-ECC.

 

[WR]

I've just looked into the matter and notice that registered/buffered RAM communicates differently from non-registered/unbuffered RAM, making it unlikely for one to run server DIMMs on a desktop board. While the traces are the same, on the K8 platform, the incompatibility arises from the IMC being unable to communicate with registered modules, but we know that multisocket Opterons don't have that problem.

However, most motherboards using non-registered RAM either support ECC or can accept ECC RAM (merely running it without ECC capability). Actual use of ECC requires ECC modules, ECC BIOS support, and an ECC memory controller, but to run an ECC module in non-ECC mode is pretty trivial.

My response to the OP remains fundamentally unchanged, though, in that without BIOS support, a 2S Opteron board cannot even power up an FX-7x series processor, as it wouldn't know the proper voltage to apply. Additionally, unbuffered memory support may not be common to all Opterons - I recently heard about Opterons running on QFX, but they were very advanced steppings that might not even be available to retail yet.