thinking of going dual, wanna know some things

[65stang]

what mother boards do i get for going dual AMD. It'll be running multi unlocked mobile barton 2500+'s. Does the board support having 2 sp-97's?? Does it need special ram? What fsb's is it going to reach? What chipset??? I need 8x agp for my 9500 pro. What power supply is needed??? If i can get good heatsinks, these 2500+'s do 2.5ghz at 1.8 vcore.

[Xaotic]

Let's start with some basic reading material. CMC has an excellent guide to nonOpteron AMD duals, stickied here:

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=221503

It'll cover most of the extended questions, but here's some of the short version.

Chipsets are MPX based and generally only overclock to 150 or so for many reasons, but lack of a 1/5 divisor or lock on the PCI bus is a major one. RAM is DDR and most boards can use nonregistered in the first 2 slots. If you need to use more than 2 slots, it all has to be registered. ECC is optional.

8X AGP does not exist till you get to Opteron boards.

Power supplies are covered quite well in the sticky. It's still ATX for most of the MPX chipset boards.

OC is a bit different due to the lack of FSB. Mostly it's pin modding the multiplier and seeing how far it will go. I don't think the SP-97s are going to fit. I have a pair of SLK-800As mounted. There's a thead here for heatsinks for the K7D:

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=214864&highlight=K7D%2A+heatsink

[zabs]

I have the Gigabyte GA-7dpxdw+. The benefit of this board is that if you go with mobile processors, you don't have to make any modifications to the processors themselves. There is one other board like this, though I can't remember which one off hand.

To the best of my knowledge all other mpx boards will support modded mobile processors.

The Gigabyte board says it require ECC registered DDR ram. I have no other kind on hand, so I cannot test if it will take nonECC/nonRegistered ram, though most boards do, in a limited number of slots on the board.

The gigabyte allows FSB adjustments in the bios upto 150. I could be mistaken, but I think the Tyan boards are the only ones that don't have FSB adjustments in the bios.

I don't think you are going to get 8x agp on any dual AMD board. As far as I know, none of them support it. Yes, a bummer.

Anything from 300watt - 550+watts can get you going. If you have a high quality PS you can do 300 watts and still have a few drives and pci cards. I have run many duals on 300 and 350 watt supplies. I think I have an enermax 430 at the moment. So long as you get 20amps on the +3.3 and 30amps on the +5 and you don't have a myriad of drives running you should be ok.

I have had a pair of mobile 2600's up to 2.4Ghz @ 1.675 volt pin mod (actual mobile core V of 1.65). Sadly their idle temp was about 70C because I'm running them on the ol' stock amd heatsink/fans that came with palaminos. I'm still waiting on a pair of better heatsink/fans to come up at the right price. For now I have toned mine down to 2266Mhz @ 1.625 volt pin mod. They run under full load at about 62C in a 24.5C room temp. I have no doubt that with some better cooling 2.5+ can be achieved. Many others have confirmed this.

I'm also sure there are other boards that would suit your needs but the Gigabyte is the only one I have to talk about. Well, that and the ol' Tyan S2460, a true solid stable workhorse, but not exactly an OC'ers dream.

[65stang]

oh well, that knocks the whole dual thing outta place. i guess i'll just build me a secondary rig.