Dual processor boards

[jediskywalker]

Do any dual processor boards exist for the Athlon XP/64 or Pentium 4 processors?
If so, any recommendations?

 

[Vette73]

P4 and Athlon64 is NOT SMP, i.e. you can't run them in dual setup.

The Dual CPU's are....

Athlon MP (can also mod most Athlon XP's) - Cheap and more easy to come by, esp if oyu mod some XP barton chips, BUT old an at the end of its life

Xeon - Very good at video editing and encoding, BUT cost a arm and a leg and is in the middle of its TRUE life span (changing sockets, bus speeds, ect...)

and lastly and what I would go with.....

Opteron Lots of choices in the board's and chips. So perfromance will be based on how much you have to spend. Only real negative, if you can even call it that, is that it of course require Reg. memory.
Dual Opteron boards start at $200 and go up to $600 and higher. Opteron chips can be had for the $1xx range and up to $1xxxx for the top of the line ones.

 

[jediskywalker]

I thought not (but a friend of mine was trying to tell me there were.. he was absolutely convinced of this..)
Know of any benchmarks, specifically for gaming applications? (Only ones I can find for Opteron and Xeon compare enterprise and serving tasks.. )
Or am I better off going with just a single Athlon 64?

How would you go about modding an XP chip (attractive option because these are really cheap.. )?

 

[Vette73]

Yea for gaming you will want a single chip system, and right now that would have to be the Athlon64.

A program has to be written to take advantage of dual cpu's and most if not next to just about all of the games out there do not.

I am running a Radeon 9800, Athlon64 3000+ on a Albatron K8X800 ProII

Video card is best bang for your buck IMO, cpu also best bang for your buck right now. And the board has fire wire, TRUE sata, TRUE Hardware sound (Envy) and goes for $119 at newegg.com

 

[LaughnCynic]

Know of any benchmarks, specifically for gaming applications? (Only ones I can find for Opteron and Xeon compare enterprise and serving tasks.. )

Look at Athlon FX51 game/use benchies and you'll get an idea of how an Opteron 148 will do since they are basically identical (FX51 just has an unlocked multiplier).

Note: You have to use Opteron 2** chips for dualies since FX** and Opteron 1** are single cpu only (as are the a64's).

 

[bunnyfubbles]

its sort of missleading to say "A program has to be written to take advantage of dual cpu's" because I believe pretty much all programs will "support" dual processor systems. It would be correct to say that "not all programs can benefit from both CPUs' processing power for its own need (as in 2 x 2.5GHz does not = 5GHz of processing power for a single application)." Otherwise programs can benefit in the sense that they can have a CPU's processing power pretty much all to themselves while you are doing other things, or if a program crashes or hangs the recovery can be much quicker with another processor uneffected.