Need Help Finding Dual Athlon XP Motherboard

[macawgumbo]

I am setting up a power house tower PC for gaming and need a motherboard that supports 2 AMD Athlon XP (NOT MP) at 1.8GHZ (2200+) and support for higher future processors. NO 64bit PCI slots (the one's used on servers that don't fit normal PCI cards) and no onboard anything sound, video, LAN. Also extreme overclocking would be nice. Anything would be great! Thanx!!

[Yodums]

Well first suggestion is that you post in the SMP section since people with duallies stick there since here is mostly single systems.

The other one is that MP and XP are identical. The MP just come w/ SMP support while some XP don't have all L5 bridges connected and not being SMP capable so you have to connect the L5 bridge to make it work in SMP, and the other thing is that the MP comes factory unlocked.

Yodums

[tainice]

U gaming is all you want, single chip is ur best choice. dual rig is for people who do lots musical, visual editin', or server type of users. For normal people, we can benefit more of just one powerful processor.

[stool]

No guarantee that XPs will work for SMP, but your best bet for finding dual mobos is Pricewatch (http://www.pricewatch.com).

[donny_paycheck]

Originally posted by macawgumbo
I am setting up a power house tower PC for gaming and need a motherboard that supports 2 AMD Athlon XP (NOT MP) at 1.8GHZ (2200+) and support for higher future processors. NO 64bit PCI slots (the one's used on servers that don't fit normal PCI cards) and no onboard anything sound, video, LAN. Also extreme overclocking would be nice. Anything would be great! Thanx!!

MP and XP CPUs are interchangeable, so long as the L5 bridge is connected. One in a zillion XPs might not work in SMP but I've never heard of this.

Extreme overclocking and dual Athlons is an oxymoron. Most boards don't go above 150FSB and don't have many tweaking options either.

All AMD SMP boards have at least two 64-bit PCI slots. Most have onboard sound, some have onboard NICs.

Welcome to the forums.

[TheDS]

I believe he wants you to recommend a board to him. There is a thread around here that lists the various MP boards that are currently available. It's sticky, so it should be easy to spot. The list includes links, so you can see what's what.

Near as I can tell, the best board you can get AT THE MOMENT is the Iwill MPx2. This can change without prior notice, and I might even be wrong, but of all the things I've read, that's the board I am looking at getting.

The only real problems that concern me are getting sufficiently powerful heatsinks into the cramped area, and having enough juice to run everything. Consider that the T-bred is the hardest-to-cool CPU yet released, and you (and I) want to put two of them together? We're asking for trouble; the P/S would have to put out at least 150 watts just for the CPUs, nevermind all the other stuff. That's a LOT OF HEAT! It's gonna be a lot of noise, too.