AMD testing

[Donald B. Kinghorn]

I had a problem with a Tyan 2460 that I got when they first came out. It 
seems that the board actually only supports 3 memory modules even though it 
has 4 slots. (??!!) I had the board in a cluster with several other Tyan 2462 
board machines all with 4 256MB mem modules. We were doing testing on the 
system and the machine with the 2460 was giving garbage results for a 
calculation that used about 700MB of memory. All smaller jobs had tested OK. 
I couldn't find the problem (went through different memory, kernels etc..) 
then I started thinking ... why does Tyan say the board only supports 3GB of 
memory ... sure enough, when I took 1 module out of the 2460 machine, it ran 
the big test job correctly. I tested this on a newer order of the mother 
boards and they seemed to be OK. The markings on the motherboard still say 
"A" but it looks a little different, the old one had dots around it. (?) I 
don't know if this is an isolated problem, just a bad board ... ??? However, 
I have seen other complaints about memory problems with the 2460. Also, I 
discovered that the sockets are "REALLY" fussy about how you insert the 
modules. If you don't get them just right memtest86 will generate errors on 
the modules even though they test good on other boards.  I assume you had 4 
512MB modules in your machine I suggest you try leaving DIMM4 empty and try 
testing the system again.   

I let Tyan know about the problem but haven't received a responce.

-Don