CHALLENGE: AIGHT WATER COOLING CHAMPs

[Ottoman]

aight guys,

here's my dillemma,

I've got this bitter rivalry with my roommate, and we are always one upping each other in PC power, well now it's my turn,

and I've been thinking of goin extreme, I wanna get a MP system,
was thinking a TYAN tiger, and I've heard rumors that u can run regular t-birds in it, and a pair of 1.4z would be much cheaper than a pair of 1.2 MPz, and 256 of DDR

and I dunno the OC capab. of the board, and even seen too much on it, but I wanna go all out,

now the prob. I know 1.4z pump out crazy heat, living in canada helps a little, put I can't use my PC outside all the time :P

hence I wanna go water cooling styles :) and go nuke with a evaporating/cooling tower,

so will one pump and a Y splice from and to the resevoir, running the blocks in series be possible? or do I hafta run 2 seperate systems?

oh and I have a budget of around $6-700 US....

is my task impossible?

[SteenkyBastage]

is your watercooling budget 6-700 bucks, or for the whole deal (mb, cpus, ram, etc)?

if it's just for the watercooling you're set.

as i haven't tried this before, dont take this as the bible, but from what i've read the athlon mp (palomino core) will give you better performance (adds sse and multiprocessor optomizations) so all in all, that 1.2mp should run if not faster, around the same as your 1.4. plus the athlon mp's supposedly use less voltage, making them run cooler to begin with. they have several other benefits, like sharig cache w/ each other and whatnot.

but the one thing to note is...you pretty much have to be using programs that are optomized for multiple processors, or you wont get much if any benefit from dual processors. (adobe photoshop, 3ds4 and other higher end software packages are what come to mind)

my vote is to either dual 1.2mp (if you have programs that will use it) or just get a great o/c board and use the 1.4tbird and oc the crap outta it.

also as far as cooling two, i would think that you could do everything in one system, however i would run the two waterblocks in "parallel" rather than in "series". in other words, try to split the flow of water before it gets to the waterblocks, then after the two flows have gone thru the waterblocks and cooled them, you would rejoin them before going into the radiator.

hope this helps

[Ottoman]

so the MP isn't worth the braggin rights?

and It wont help me in gaming and benchmarking?

and go with an Iwill and a t-bird?

or would a "cooler" 1.2 MP OC more than a 1.4 t-bird if I put it in a regular board?

[SteenkyBastage]

unfortunately, i haven't heard squat about people oc'ing the athlon mp chips. i would have to imagine they would be able to overclock, but as i've not heard anything, i cant say yes, no or how well.

i have heard (take it with a grain of salt, not sure if it's true or not) q3 arena is multiprocessor compatible, but other than that i haven't ever heard of any other game being able to use 2 processors to boost performance.

the one thing to note, overclocking it aside, the MP (and supposedly the new athlon palominos due out soon) can benefit from SSE and (i think) SSE2 instructions, which will help substantialy on any software that uses that. on that note, it would probably help any SSE optomized games by using an athlon mp or waiting and getting an athlon palomino.

but also to note, in reality, any new cpu you get (be it tbird, mp, or palomino) will seriously scream. and i dont know that you would be able to tell much (if any) difference between the three when you're gaming. now, if you're after benchmarks and stuff...yeah, you'll be able to see the differences.

in answer to "the mp isn't worth the bragging rights?"

probably not, if all you're after is bragging rights. IMO, the dual proc systems would be worth it if you decided to use 3d animation programs or run a server or other complicated multitasking jobs like that.

if you want a gaming system now, price and defenitive oc ability would point to the tbird 1.4. if you can hold off a bit, i'd say the upcoming palomino would overall give best performance, altho i have yet to hear their pricing for them.

[train22]

The MPs overclock fine but, when dual overclocking more probs arise which leads to lower o/c with dual MPs. Any dual type system will not o/c as much as taking each of the 2 cpus and sticking them into a 1 socket system.