Dual processor comparisons to single CPUs

[conjh13]

I found this article especially interesting, since - as many of you already know - I run a dual P3 system. Mine happens to be 2 933's OC'd to 1050.

[finger51]

My VP6 and I are very happy to have super geek validation.

2x933's
RAID 0
1 GIG RAMDISK!!
1380Megs of PC133

[juststoppinby]

Let me ask you a question. Having a great computer is really cool. But what do you guys do that needs that type of power? I'm extremely jealous.

Athlon 1Ghz
512MB PC133

which reminds me... how important is RAM integrity? 512MB PC133 for $32 compared to some at $125

[BBA]

It's not that I do a lot that needs super computing power, but I just like the response a Dual cpu box gives. It seems to not slow down in games like single cpu systems do, although overall frame rate maxes out about the same as the single.
At work I have a 733 single cpu with 256M ram and at home I have a dual 650 @ 728 MHz. I hate using the one at work because it just seems to choke on almost anything intensive, where the dualee just runs smoothly no matter what.

As for ram integrity, cheap ram causes problems.

Cheap ram will help you fine tune your installation-reinstallation skills.

When you hear of people saying my windows crashes everyday or such, the majority of the time it is because they have sub-par memory ( the kicker is that some of the more expensive ram is less stable than some of the cheap stuff...so you have to be lucky or research the ram before buying...no matter the cost).

I used ECC memory in my dualee and never even have to reboot. My single cpu server uses non-ecc infineon ram ( @ 133 MHz FSB ) and it's pretty stable too...except for a few hangups lately ( but thats because I have been messing with stuff ).




[This message has been edited by BBA (edited 08-17-2001).]

[LostBok]

All I can say is that despite how old my main PC's motherboard is now (3 years old)... I was only tempted to up the CPU's last year: when I went from dual P2 350Mhz to dual P3 500's @ 560Mhz.

Despite the relatively slow CPU speeds you spend less time sitting around twiddling your thumbs and getting frustrated when you're multi-tasking than you do on your average single P3-800Mhz (of which I have several)....

Only drawback is the TekRam P6B40D-A5 (http://www.tekram.com/Hot_Products.asp?Product=P6B40D-A5) that I have only caches the first 512meg despite being a BX chipset: hence it slowed RIGHT down when I put 1Gig of RAM in it, but back at 512meg its still quite fast enough for all the latest games (with a GeForce DDR) and lets face it, the main system bottleneck these days is STILL the discs, despite having a HPT370 with 2 x 40gig IBM GXP60's!

All I can say is that until they they SERIOUSLY redesign CPU's I'll be sticking with dual, even if its at a much slower clock speed.

[LostBok]

Having said that (three year old board still "cutting the mustard", so to speak): which are the favoured dual CPU boards out there at the mo?

2gig RAM support required.
Onboard IDE RAID preferred (8x IDE in total)

SCSI and 10/100TX onboard also very nice, but SCSI usually seems a bit expensive when all I need is an AHA-2940U!

[conjh13]

My mobo's a MSI 694D Pro. It supports up to 2 gig of SDRAM, it has two IDE controllers (no raid or scsi), 5 PCI slots, an AGP x4 slot, 2 USB, onboard sound, and all the standard ports for ATX boards.

[maface]

What O/S do you guys use for your Dual Systems?

[finger51]

HI Kids~

What do I do with my machine? half the time, is just normal everyday stuff. email surfing etc. Its pretty cool watching Outlook snap open seemingly instantaneously. On my work computer it takes about 10 seconds to open Outlook.
The times that I love the most are when I'm using 3D Studio Max and rendering a scene that is 1200X1600- with lots of flame, transparency, shadows, or just plain high poly count. My rig cruises. The rendering progress bar zips by.
When I first started getting into animation, I bought a top of the line Pentium Pro 200Mhz with 32megs of ram. That box cost me $2500. It would take about 24 hours to render a 3 minute scene. That same scene now takes about 2.5 hours on my dually.
The other thing I love about my dually is video editing. I get movies off of mIRC which come in parts. I'll use Premiere to sew them together. Using the ramdrive improves the output speed by about 10X.

As far as which boards to use, I look for a board that has a user group associated with it. My first dual board was an Abit BP6 . I wanted a cheap dual board and this one fit the bill. The bios is an overclockers dream come true, and celerons are very inexpensive. I liked the message board at that site because you can find the answer to a lot of questions associated with that mobo.
My latest dual board is Abit's next gen. VP6 - another great board which supports overclocking, RAIDs 0, 1, & 0+1 and 2 gigs of PC133 Ram.

I assembled both of these machines for under $1k each. That was the other cincher. It is so easy and inexpensive to build machines by yourself these days- I couldn't resist...

[LostBok]

thanks, Conj, but I'm fairly keen to get onboard RAID, saves me a PCI slot, plus there isn't much point with the sound as I've got a SB Live! already...

I'm running win2000 Pro on my main workstation and I have a dual P2-300Mhz, 256meg ECC EDO RAM which I switch back and forth between all different combinations, usually dual boot: win98 (no dual CPU support) and BeOS 5.0 pro (only BeOS pro has dual CPU support in v5, std does NOT!) or win98 and RedHat 7.1.... sometimes NT4 or 2000, but mostly the win98/Linux combo.

Enjoy!

[conjh13]

What OS? I currently have a dual-boot setup with Win98SE and Win2k. Win98 for gaming, and Win2K for apps, since 98 doesn't actually support dual proccessors. Eventually I hope to have Linux on it too.

[finger51]

Win2k for me. I haven't found a game yet that doesn't work...

[BBA]

Favorite motherboard? Well, I do like my 3 year old Epox KP6-BS. Right now I am running dual FC-PGA coppermines and W2K on it with full ACPI. It is extremely stable...and I can even run 1GHz and newer CPU's on it. Thats a pretty good run of upgradeability since it was originally designed for the P2 CPU.

I used to like the BP6, I even modified one to show two coppermines DO work on them ( I am kind of proud of the fact that I was the first person to ever make that work on the BP6, and I didn't use no stinkin neo adapters ). I gave up on the BP6 because it is inherently unstable at high cpu currents demand, such as the coppermine at 133MHz. Very few have been able to run them at 133 MHz even after voltage regulator mods.


I do think my next board just might be this one:
http://www.amazoninternational.com/tyan_tiger_k7.htm

It's just too darn sweet...even if it does use AMD processors

[BBA]

Oooolala....

Chect this out:
http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/r...le_id=45000195

[moebius]

BBA - I read that article at Ace's Hardware. Amazing how the dual athlon doesn't just beat the dual xeon, but clobbers the heck out of it!! It's too bad all the oems are afraid of the 800 pound gorilla. If only they'd just study how much money they are losing by not using the high performing athlons. Not to mention the benefit to the consumers.