– By Jeff Field –

With the advent of 266MHz DDR memory, many people are looking to build new systems around this new, faster RAM. Many DDR-capable motherboards are rather expensive, coming in at nearly $200, but there are bargain DDR boards out there. Today, I’m reviewing one of them, the Soyo SY-K7ADA.The board
The K7ADA is an ATX board based on the ALI MAGiK1 DDR Athlon/Duron chipset. ALI has been in the chipset market for several years, focusing mostly on the low end. The board is a fairly compact design, the smallest ATX Athlon board I have tested so far.

Expansion
Surprisingly, though the board is designed more for cost than expandability, the K7ADA has ample room for most people. It comes with five PCI slots and one AGP slot, and while another PCI slot would have been useful, the number of slots is acceptable. For memory expansion, it has three 184-pin DDR slots capable of holding up to 1.5 gigabytes of DDR memory. The board includes two ATA-100 connectors for up to four ATA devices. For external expansion, it includes two USB ports, with the capability of adding four more, as well as two serial ports, one parallel port, one PS/2 mouse port and one PS/2 keyboard port. The board also includes onboard sound, with a game port, line in, line out and microphone ports. The audio is provided by the on-chip audio.

Layout and design
I found the K7ADA to be generally well designed. I found only two issues with the board, the first that the ATX power connector was too far down the board, making it so you have to extend the power cord further, potentially over or around the heat sink, a minor problem. The other issue comes into play with longer AGP and PCI cards, and this one can be more problematic. The floppy connector is right behind the AGP and first two PCI slots, which may obstruct longer PCI cards from being placed in those slots. This would hardly be an issue, but it also affects the AGP slot, of which there is only one. In most cases, the floppy cable can be pressed down enough for it not to matter, but it is something that users may encounter.

Documentation and configuration
Unlike the Gigabyte 7DXR I reviewed last week, the K7ADA does not come with a complete manual. Rather, it comes with a 23-page booklet that contains all the basic information on installing and configuring the board, such as jumper configurations and how to install a CPU in the socket. The documentation is adequate and well written but does not go into great detail.

Configuration of the board was easy, with most settings available through the BIOS. CPU FSB speed is set with a dip switch and is configurable for either 200 or 266MHz.

Performance
System Specifications
AMD Athlon 1.4GHz
256 Megs DDR PC2100 RAM from Crucial.com
Western Digital 7200 RPM 10.2 Gig Hard Drive
3Com 3C905TX-C 10/100 NIC (PCI)
300 Watt AMD-Approved ATX Power Supply
Abit Siluro GeForce 2 MX400 64MB AGP

Kernel compiles
In order to test both the boards stability and speed, I ran three sets of Linux kernel compiles on this board. One is a normal, “uniprocessor” make, or make -j1, which is the default. This uses one process, and does not always maximize system usage. I then did make -j2, which spawns a second process. The last test I ran is with make -j3, spawning two extra processes. I do this for several reasons — to find the “sweet spot” for the board/CPU, as well as to stress the system as much as possible when trying to rate its stability. Also, the kernel is extremely useful as a measure of integer performance.

Kernel 2.4.6 compile times (Minutes:Seconds)

Kernel Compile
Board	-j1	-j2	-j3
Soyo SY-K7ADA	4:37	4:32	4:28
Gigabyte 7DXR	4:29	4:20	4:21

Kernel compile times tend to be similar between motherboards that run the same type of CPU, because they are heavily dependent on the CPU. However, we can also see there is an obvious, if small difference between the K7ADA and the 7DXR — this can probably be attributed to the known poor memory performance of the ALI MAGiK1 chipset — not devastatingly slow, but measurable, at least. Overall, however, the K7ADA makes out well in this test.

POVRay benchmarks
POVRay is a multi-platform raytracing program. It is a very floating-point intensive task and serves well to help measure the floating point performance of a CPU. For more information on this benchmark, head to the official POVBENCH homepage. The command to run for this benchmark, once you obtain POVRay, you run povray -i skyvase.pov +v1 +ft -x +mb25 +a0.300 +j1.000 +r3 -q9 -w640 -H480 -S1 -E480 -k0.000 -mv2.0 +b1000 from the command prompt. Results are in seconds.

POVRay (Seconds)

POVRay
Board	Result
Soyo SY-K7ADA	15
Gigabyte 7DXR	17

As you can see from this, the results are extremely close, only varying by two seconds. Clearly, POVRay is more CPU dependent than other tests.

Gears
Gears, which is included with Mesa, is, to be blunt, a useless benchmark. It is the most basic of OpenGL benchmarks, but because it takes so little time to run (open a console in X, and type ‘gears’) I figured I would include it for completeness. I say again, this benchmark is almost as useless as BogoMIPS.

Gears (Frames/Second)

Gears
Board	Result
Soyo SY-K7ADA	1639.000
Gigabyte 7DXR	1646.000

Quake 3 Arena
Quake 3 Arena is perhaps the most popular 3D game available for Linux, and thus is the best benchmark of 3D game performance under Linux. The benchmark is faily simple, open a console (press the ~ key) and type timedemo 1 followed by demo four.dm_66 in the resolutions you wish to benchmark. Once the test is done, press ~ again and the results will be in the console.

Quake 3 Arena timedemos (Frames Per Second)

Gigabyte 7DXR
Board	640×480	800×600	1024×768	1200×1024	1600×1200
Soyo SY-K7ADA	175.4	129.3	85.1	52.8	36.8
Gigabyte 7DXR	175.4	130.2	85.5	52.9	36.8

As you can see, Quake III is dependent on two things, the graphics card, and the CPU. As such, there is little difference between the boards, even at lower resolutions.

Bonnie++ results
Bonnie++ is a hard drive benchmark that tests the writing and reading
from both a single large file (such as that of a database) and many small files (like a proxy, or mail program). It is
useful for simulating performance under such applications.

Bonnie++ results
Sequential Output
Controller	Per-Character	Block	Rewrite
Gigabyte 7DXR	8608 K/sec, 57% CPU	20787 K/sec, 20% CPU	5168 K/sec, 4% CPU
Soyo SY-K7ADA	15544 K/sec, 99% CPU	26980 K/sec, 20% CPU	8951 K/sec, 5% CPU
Sequential Input			Random
Controller	Per-Character	Block	Random
Gigabyte 7DXR	11187 K/sec, 61% CPU	21949 K/sec, 14% CPU	111.2 Seeks/sec, 0% CPU
Soyo SY-K7ADA	12660 K/sec, 70% CPU	22296 K/sec, 8% CPU	134.1 Seeks/sec, 0% CPU
Sequential Create
Controller	Create	Read	Delete
Gigabyte 7DXR	18752 /sec, 99% CPU	none	22857/sec, 100% CPU
Soyo SY-K7ADA	18623 /sec, 100% CPU	none	22322/sec, 100% CPU
Random Create
Controller	Create	Read	Delete
Gigabyte 7DXR	15559 /sec, 86% CPU	none	19043/sec, 99% CPU
Soyo SY-K7ADA	17874 /sec, 100% CPU	none	18820/sec, 99% CPU

As you can see, in the Bonnie tests, neither board here scores particularly better than the other, except for the K7ADA in the sequential output test. Bonnie++ results depend more on the hard drive than the controller, and so I run this test only to insure there are no problems with the controller on the boards.

HDParm
HDparm tests the maximum data transfer rate of a hard drive in with two methods, uncached (but buffered still by the hard drives on board buffer) and cached (buffered by the drive and cached via the operating system cache). While the uncached test should not vary between different controllers that support the drive’s ATA-version (such at ATA-66, which is what this drive uses), the cached test varies between boards because it is essentially a test of the CPU, cache and RAM on a system. This is what makes it interesting in this case — it can help showcase the memory performance of these two boards.

hdparm -t (Uncached) Results
Soyo SY-K7ADA	23.79 MB/sec
Gigabyte 7DXR	23.88 MB/sec
hdparm -T (Cached) Results
Soyo SY-K7ADA	216.95 MB/sec
Gigabyte 7DXR	220.69 MB/sec

In this test, the Gigabyte 7DXR pulls slightly ahead, by roughly four megabytes per second. Hardly noticeable, but it again illustrates the slight difference in performance between the ALI MAGiK1 chipset the K7ADA is based on and the AMD760.

Conclusion
Overall, the K7ADA is a solid performer. It’s not quite as fast as the 7DXR, but at almost half the price, the K7ADA is quite a bargain. If you are looking for DDR memory but don’t want to pay too much for a motherboard, the K7ADA is definitely worth a look. You don’t get on-board RAID, but if that is not something you need, then this board might be a good way to save yourself some money. With DDR memory being as low as it is — in fact, I just picked up 768 megabytes of DDR from Crucial.com for $140 — and Athlon 1.4GHz CPUs going for as little as $160 on Pricewatch, now is an excellent time to upgrade, and by purchasing DDR memory, you might get longer use out of the memory you buy now, because DDR is rapidly replacing PC133. The Soyo SY-K7ADA is available on Pricewatch for about $103 with shipping.

In this IBM developerWorks article, Northern Light programmer Teodor Zlatanov supplies a few ideas on the use of Perl and the configuration engine (ccfengine) to streamline system administration.

Commentary from LinuxPlanet: “As readers of this column cannot have escaped noticing, there is no one louder in defense of copyright protections
than I am. But there is a difference between the ability to violate copyright and actually doing so.

The community is enraged, but the rest of the world doesn’t give much of a toot, one way or the other. Sound
familiar?

That is how totalitarianism is achieved. You pick a fairly small, even fringe, community, and you use them to create the
underpinnings for what could result in far broader controls. There’s no broad outcry, because people figure it doesn’t
effect them, and they’re too busy worrying about the truly important stuff, such as how the Yankees are doing.”

Germany’s SuSE Linux AG has announced a 10 percent reduction in its workforce. The company said that it will eliminate about fifty non-technical positions in various locations around Germany. In a press release announcing the job cuts, the company said its move was “a direct response to recent economic trends in the overall industry.” In February, SuSE laid off the majority of its US-based marketing and product support staff.

According to this eWEEK article (at Yahoo), IT departments are sick and tired of dealing with the never-ending flow of serious security bugs in Microsoft’s enterprise software. To quote one admin: “Maintaining IIS servers is a cumbersome, tedious process. Any time you bring a new server online, you have to apply 40 or 50 patches.” So, what are these mad as hell and not going to take it anymore admins planning to do about this? For the sake of convenience and the departmental bottom line, most plan on waiting around for yet another patch from the Redmond mothership.

Fredericksburg, Va.-July 23, 2001-Zope Corporation (www.zope.com), the premier open source content management company, today announced its name change in recognition of the broad acceptance of its Zope platform and services. Zope Corporation also announced the availability of Zope 2.4, which provides even richer features to enable organizations to deploy and manage complex content management applications. These new features continue to improve the time-to-market advantage for Fortune 1000 companies, corporate intranets, community Web sites and content publishers.
“The name change from Digital Creations to Zope Corporation is a natural move as our product offerings, and services business, continue to evolve in the content management space,” said Hadar Pedhazur, chairman of Zope Corporation. “Zope has a tremendous following in the open source community as well as in many large companies whose solutions have been deployed with the Zope platform. This name change is intended to ensure that Zope, and the company that develops Zope, are more closely associated with one another in the marketplace.”

The Zope family of solutions makes it easy to rapidly build high-performance, scalable, secure, content management systems so that even non-technical users can maintain them. This ease-of-use combined with its open source roots make the Zope family of content creation, distribution and publication solutions extremely flexible and customizable. Zope offers premier for-fee products and services for complex, large-scale applications. In addition, there are over 20,000 developers contributing to Zope who can assist on smaller scale projects.

Zope 2.4 provides enhancements that help businesses quickly build powerful custom content management systems. The new features include:

Support for Python 2.1 Programming Language-Zope 2.4 is compatible with Python 2.1 and all of the features and functionality that come along with the new version of this renowned open source scripting language. Python enables developers to customize and build content management solutions for a wide variety of applications.

WebDAV-Distributed authoring and versioning allow content creators to interact with Zope through a file-based system for ease-of-use, which in turn enables seamless Web content development and updates from popular desktop programs.

Developer Productivity-Zope 2.4 empowers developers to quickly write new components and have them automatically update the system, which promotes developer productivity as they focus on the components they are writing rather than on updating the system.

Consulting Services, Pricing, Availability
Zope 2.4 is open source and available at www.zope.com. Zope Corporation also provides a full range of solutions for corporations requiring implementation assistance and/or specialized applications.

About Zope Corporation
Zope Corporation is the creator of a family of open source and for-fee content management solutions that help companies deliver and manage information. Zope also delivers a wide range of consulting and support services to a broad array of customers including Fortune 1000, media/telecom and government. The company’s flagship platform, also called Zope, is built using Python, a high-level, easy-to-use, open source language enabling the quick development and deployment of comprehensive, flexible solutions. Zope is used by customers in over 62 countries, and supported by a global developer community. Zope Corporation is headquartered in Fredericksburg, VA, and its PythonLabs division is located in Tyson’s Corner, VA. Opticality Ventures I, LP, J.H. Whitney IV, LP and The Intel 64 Fund, are investors in the company. For more information, please visit www.zope.com

After spending several years talking about making the .us top-level domain more acecssible, the U.S. Department of Commerce is finally ready to transform its words into action. Public interest groups argue that the DoC is needlessly auctioning off a valuable public resource, and that such moves are not needed now that ICANN is in the processes of rolling out new global top-level domains, such as .biz and .info. Full story at Interactive Week.

Anonymous Reader writes “Wincor Nixdorf Inc. today announced that The Home Depot has
chosen the Linux-based BEETLE/Mobile Point-of-Sale (POS) platform
for supporting their mobile inventory management applications in
the company’s Expo Design Center stores. Story at LinuxDevices.com . . . “

Interactive Week takes a look at FTC chairman Timothy Muris and the ideological-political circus surround his agency’s privacy initiatives. Muris says his agency is in the process of developing a privacy agenda, and while he hasn’t announced his position on any privacy legislation to date, he promises more investigations of privacy violations than took place under Robert Pitofsky, his Clinton-era predecessor.

Microsoft can huff and puff about Open Source all it wants, but that hasn’t stopped a few large companies from adopting Linux for mission-critical business systems. While Craig Mundie was calling Linux and other Open Source code “a security risk,” Korean Airlines was preparing to move its flight crew scheduling and revenue accounting systems over to an IBM mainframe running Linux. Over at Newell-Rubbermaid, the household goods manufacturer has been running its Multi Router Traffic Grapher network analysis tool via Linux for the past ten months, saving about $60,000 in the process. And RV maker Winnebago has saved a bundle on software licensing costs by consolidating its various e-mail systems on a IBM mainframe running Linux. Full story at ZDNet Interactive Week.