Newbie qestion about dual XP's

Iv been thinking about building a dual XP system now for awhile but had some questions.

The board that I will end up going with is the MSI K7D Master-L with two XP 2400's since I already have one now.

How high on a FSB should I be able to reach on this board? Would I be able to get 166mhz?

Would using PC2700 ram over pc2100 help at all with overclock the FSB? Must it be ECC?

Am I correct in saying all I need to do to mod the chips to MP's is to connect the last L5 bridge?

My main system now is a nforce2 board running at 200FSB with the mem at 400Mhz, when it comes to doing stuff that wont use both cpus such as playing UT2004, am I going to see a major performance hit since the MSI is running the memory alot slower (ie. 133fsb/266mem) then the nForce2?

DragonFire said:

Iv been thinking about building a dual XP system now for awhile but had some questions.

The board that I will end up going with is the MSI K7D Master-L with two XP 2400's since I already have one now.

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Make sure you get another of the same type. You may get lucky and be able to run a TBred A with a TBred B, but I wouldn't count on it.

DragonFire said:

How high on a FSB should I be able to reach on this board? Would I be able to get 166mhz?

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You should be able to get 140MHz. If you're lucky you may get it to 150MHz. The clockgen on the board does not allow anything higher than 150MHz, so your chances of getting 166 are zero

DragonFire said:

Would using PC2700 ram over pc2100 help at all with overclock the FSB? Must it be ECC?

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Using PC2700 would help, as it would be running below stock settings. It does not need to be ECC or registered, though if you want to use more than two DIMM slots all the DIMMs must be registered.

DragonFire said:

Am I correct in saying all I need to do to mod the chips to MP's is to connect the last L5 bridge?

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Yes and no ... If you have a locked CPU, then in order to get the CPUs operating at a reasonable speed, you'll need to fill in all three of the broken L5 bridges to mobilise the chips, and also use the patched BIOS to do SMP with you "mobile" CPUs.

DragonFire said:

My main system now is a nforce2 board running at 200FSB with the mem at 400Mhz, when it comes to doing stuff that wont use both cpus such as playing UT2004, am I going to see a major performance hit since the MSI is running the memory alot slower (ie. 133fsb/266mem) then the nForce2?

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It depends a lot on the application. For a moderately high-end card and games, yes you will take a hit, probably somewhere between 10% and 15%. IIRC my friend's system at ~200x10 was about 15% faster than mine (133x15) in BF1942 with a 9800Pro at stock (both Bartons). I've been meaning to get some Far Cry numbers for a while, but have never got around to it.

However, if I steal some more RAM off him (512 just doesn't cut it for this sort of thing), I can run a dedicated server with ~50 bots and 8 humans AND the client without taking a huge hit in performance.

emboss said:

Make sure you get another of the same type. You may get lucky and be able to run a TBred A with a TBred B, but I wouldn't count on it.

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Well my 2400+ is a B and I would think that all 2400+ are Bs.

You should be able to get 140MHz. If you're lucky you may get it to 150MHz. The clockgen on the board does not allow anything higher than 150MHz, so your chances of getting 166 are zero

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I thought I read a post about someone running at 166Mhz using this board...

Using PC2700 would help, as it would be running below stock settings. It does not need to be ECC or registered, though if you want to use more than two DIMM slots all the DIMMs must be registered.

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That is nice to know since I'm using two 512 PC2700 sticks now....

Yes and no ... If you have a locked CPU, then in order to get the CPUs operating at a reasonable speed, you'll need to fill in all three of the broken L5 bridges to mobilise the chips, and also use the patched BIOS to do SMP with you "mobile" CPUs.

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My current 2400+ is unlocked and I think I would look around ebay first to find another one that is unlocked.

It depends a lot on the application. For a moderately high-end card and games, yes you will take a hit, probably somewhere between 10% and 15%. IIRC my friend's system at ~200x10 was about 15% faster than mine (133x15) in BF1942 with a 9800Pro at stock (both Bartons). I've been meaning to get some Far Cry numbers for a while, but have never got around to it.

However, if I steal some more RAM off him (512 just doesn't cut it for this sort of thing), I can run a dedicated server with ~50 bots and 8 humans AND the client without taking a huge hit in performance.

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Well I do have a 9800 Pro tho with the settings I use now I dunno if I want to take a 10-15% hit. Almost seems like it wouldnt be worth it because of the memory bottleneck or would a dual setup really outweight having the performance hit?

I'm curious, why hasnt anyone ever made a SMP chipset that supports faster FSB/MEM speeds for the athlon?

It almost seems silly to build a dual 2800+ MP setup when a single 2400/2600+ will beat it in almost everything just because of the FSB...

DragonFire said:

Well my 2400+ is a B and I would think that all 2400+ are Bs.

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Some 2400's are Thortons IIRC ...

DragonFire said:

I thought I read a post about someone running at 166Mhz using this board...

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The only board I know of that can get above 150MHz is the MPX2. The K7D is most certainly limited to 150MHz (unless you go completely nuts and resolder about half a dozen crystals on the board, and I don't recall anyone going that far).

DragonFire said:

Well I do have a 9800 Pro tho with the settings I use now I dunno if I want to take a 10-15% hit. Almost seems like it wouldnt be worth it because of the memory bottleneck or would a dual setup really outweight having the performance hit?

I'm curious, why hasnt anyone ever made a SMP chipset that supports faster FSB/MEM speeds for the athlon?

It almost seems silly to build a dual 2800+ MP setup when a single 2400/2600+ will beat it in almost everything just because of the FSB...

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If you're not going to use SMP-capable apps (or do heavy multitasking), then yes, it IS silly to buy a SMP machine The majority of things that a dual-CPU setup is bought for benefit greatly from SMP, and often don't benefit greatly from an increased FSB. For example, the only uniprocessor system that beats mine in POVRay is an Itanium 2.

The primary reason noone else but AMD has made a dual socket-A chipset is simply due to cost. A dual CPU northbridge is extremely expensive to design and test, and the target market is quite small. Much more so than a uniprocessor one. VIA started designing one at one point but gave up due to the technical issues (which is what prompted AMD to design the MP chipset in the first place). The Opteron doesn't have this problem as much more of the logic is built into the chip.

That leaves AMD to release a chipset with a 1/5 or 1/6 divider. The chipset itself is capable of operating at 166MHz, and then some, as demonstrated by IWill (the main problem being the very out-of-spec bus speeds). I'm sure adding another divider or two can't be too complex, but then I don't know all the nasty clock synchronisation issues that would surface in such a complex chip. Then, AMD needs to get motherboard manufacturer support. The only manufacturer that could use the new chipset without a large expenditure would be IWill. They could pretty much just drop in the new revision and be done. All the others would probably have to to major board redesigns, seeing how many of these boards fail to even get to 150MHz. Most, I suspect, would say "stuff it" and not use the new chipset.

So, it basically comes down to money. The dual-CPU market is fairly small, and the benefits of a higher FSB are fairly minimal. It's just not financially sensible to upgrade it.

Thanks for the info...

I guess what I'll do then is use the very old dual pentium pro I have for a file server. Spending $60 to upgrade it to P2 333mhz overdrive's will be a lot cheaper then trying to replace my main rig with a dual setup. Tho whats amusing about the dual pro setup is that it has a geforce FX 5200 for a video card!