jerseygamer :
I have been debating building a Spider platform for kicks over the holiday.
Has anyone put one together? Please if so list your results. I am building this rig as an affordable gaming platform that does not need a total transplant every year.
I'm debating building a Spider platform as well, though for somewhat different reasons. Since the Spider mobo can support an AM2 cpu and DDR2 ram, I could use those at the moment, since the 5000+ Black Edition far outperforms the Phenom. Later, when the bugs get worked out of the Phenom and some high performance Phenom CPUs come out, I can put one of those in, change the ram, and I'm set.
A general fear here is that the Phenom may never get repaired or even if repaired, it may not perform very well anyway. After that, the Phenom may disappear. A memory of what happened last year when AMD came out with the QFX makes this possibility all too real. AMD promised great things with the QFX platform, along with a series of CPUs that would make it even better. The QFX flopped, the new CPUs were never introduced, and now the whole QFX of last year is nothing more than an example of everything going wrong.
The only good thing here is that even if Phenom itself fails, the Spider platform may live on with AM2 chips, DDR2 ram, and lots of video cards, so the investment into the mobo wouldn't be a total loss. Of course, that also depends on the mobo being available. So far, I've seen very few actually for sale. Maybe the mobo companies are figuring out that the Spider platform, like that of the QFX, isn't one on which to spend a lot of money for developement.