Motherboard ???

[Brian]

Who should I go with for a dual Athlon board? I miss multi processors and think it's about time to build another one.

[john]

good question. i was going to build a SMP box but opted not to simply because of the added cost.

[exciv2000]

Not sure if Giga-byte makes dual boards, but they are an excellent mobo manufacturer. Also, Tyan makes fairly decent boards, albeit most of them don't have all the features you'd find on a giga-byte or Asus<--That's another one to check out. Try to stay away from Abit and Soyo, I've had some serious problems with certain boards of theirs. Not sure if Super-Micro is still in business, but they used to make kick ass SMP boards. Check out www.tomshardware.com too for recommendations.

[Brian]

I had a supermicro in my dual p2400 and always had stability issues. Maybe it was the power supply though. I went through like 3 in a year. I hear that you can actually use the athlon xp's for a dual setup even though amd says to use the MP's. The MP's cost like twice as much for the same processor. I've heard tons of success stories with it though, and hell you can pick up athlon xp 2200+ for like $89.00 right now.

Scott, i'll go check out those links and see what I find. I seem to remember another site dedicated to smp systems and components. Maybe it was like 2cpu.com. I'll keep you guys posted on what I find.

[ShervRacer]

Tyan Tyan Tyan.
They are the best for both AMD and Intel. i have never seen an unsatisfied customor with Tyan. I have sold many of those to people and they were all happy

[jojo]

I run an Epox board with my AMD. Never had any problems.

[exciv2000]

Originally posted by 1EightT
I had a supermicro in my dual p2400 and always had stability issues. Maybe it was the power supply though. I went through like 3 in a year.

Really? My linux box is running off of dual PII 333s right now on a SuperMicro board, with a cheap ass power supply, and I have had no problems whatsoever. Maybe it's just windows that has stability issues :)

[92AccordLXCoupe]

dual processors wont speed up your computer I hope you know. It only assists in running the multiple programs for instructional purposes only and when your rocking 2.4ghz you wont notice any difference. I dont know what your purpose for that would be.

[exciv2000]

Originally posted by 92AccordLXCoupe
dual processors wont speed up your computer I hope you know. It only assists in running the multiple programs for instructional purposes only and when your rocking 2.4ghz you wont notice any difference. I dont know what your purpose for that would be.

Well duh, but actually it does speed up your machine. I can run seti on one processor exclusively and run everything else on the other processor. If I were to run seti and everything exclusively one one processor, the seti program would slow down when other instructions are using the same processor. Just an example. It all depends on what you're doing with the dual procs.

[Brian]

I do a lot of 3d renderings and animations using lightwave where in you can set the number of threads to process making full use of multi processors. This is my third SMP setup so I know where they work and don't work. They are also nice for background tasks as scott pointed out. If i'm playing a game I can set the affinity of the game to processor 0 while all of my background processes are still getting full cpu time from processor 0. Most of the programs I use day to day are multithreaded and will take full advantage of a second processor. Now if you just type word documents and use a computer for e-mail then yeah there really is no point to the added cost.

As an example I modeled an exact replica of our downstairs to see how it would look after the remodel. I used radiosity for the lighting and a single frame took over 12 hours to render. If I would have had a second processor that time would have been cut by nore than half which justifies it right there for me.

[john]

If the OS can thread, and the apps are threaded, the result will be a substantiall increase in performance & throughput.

Don't spout off w/o facts. Please.


Originally posted by 92AccordLXCoupe
dual processors wont speed up your computer I hope you know. It only assists in running the multiple programs for instructional purposes only and when your rocking 2.4ghz you wont notice any difference. I dont know what your purpose for that would be.

[john]

FWIW, I've got a couple MSI boards in my boxes here @ home, running single athlon 2200/1.8ghz chips. Very easy to O/C, and pretty hearty boards. I ended up overclocking the FSB on one of them to 532 mhz vs 266 mhz. My mistake, the machine HAULED ASS, but was somewhat unstable. :) Didn't burn anything up, either.

I think that Tyan makes some damn good boards, as well as does supermicro.

[Brian]

Originally posted by john
FWIW, I've got a couple MSI boards in my boxes here @ home, running single athlon 2200/1.8ghz chips. Very easy to O/C, and pretty hearty boards. I ended up overclocking the FSB on one of them to 532 mhz vs 266 mhz. My mistake, the machine HAULED ASS, but was somewhat unstable. :) Didn't burn anything up, either.

I think that Tyan makes some damn good boards, as well as does supermicro.

wow, now that's some overclocking. You should throw a watercooling setup on that sucker and go for it ;)

[Bedlam]

Originally posted by john
Don't spout off w/o facts. Please.

Amen brother John! That was a pretty silly post for the crowd you are in...not trying to be a flamer here..but honestly.

Of course...how about multi chip intel love...with the Hyper-threading technology? That could be yummy goodness there.

-Bedlam

[Brian]

Originally posted by Bedlam
Amen brother John! That was a pretty silly post for the crowd you are in...not trying to be a flamer here..but honestly.

Of course...how about multi chip intel love...with the Hyper-threading technology? That could be yummy goodness there.

-Bedlam

I would love to, but I can't afford intel chips these days. Hyperthreading looks like it's going to give the performance edge to intel (for a few months) at least.