DUAL MOTHERBOARD QUESTION&#39S

[Carmine_Paterno]

I am thinking of buying a ABIT VP6 (dual FCPGA) (P3-coppermine) mobo and it has AGP 4X. I am relly into gaming and want a high performance machine. I am going to put two P3-700's in an o/c them to 1ghz each. I am going to use raid striping with 2 10 gb 10,000 rpm hard drives. I am also going to buy a Geforce II Ultra. Would this be a good motherboard to do this on. I like to do alot of benchmarks...and i was wondering if anybody knows if any company is going to make a dual AGP motherboard with 2 agp slots. I would like to keep my main card in one slot and keep the other one open for testing. Does anyone think this will happen? Back to the first subject...Any other motherboard suggestions, or experiences? THANX

 

[Carmine_Paterno]

ehhhh...anyone there...BUMP

 

[Tim-]

I have a VP6 with PIII-700 cc0's @ 1GHz and it is a good setup. VERY stable so far. As for 2 AGP slots I think that would be highly unlikely since the market for it would be pretty limited.

Keep in mind that you will need W2000 or NT to use both cpu's, and the vast majority of software is NOT threaded to really utilize both of them. If you are looking for a dramatic increase in speed across the board, a dual cpu setup is not going to give it to you. It will be slightly faster at most things, and quite a bit faster with properly threaded software (40-50%). Unless you do a lot of CAD, video editing, graphic arts, number crunching, etc. it will not be very noticable
over a single PIII at similar speeds.

RAID is a big plus though! Although, that doesn't require dual processors to implement.

The current demand to feed dual processors, especially overclocked is also very high- you will need a good power supply with 300 watts being the recommended minimum. Also extra RAM is recommended for optimum performance.

It is easy to end up with a lot of money invested for the returns you will see going dual. You can create a monster for the same, or less money with a single cpu! If your application doesn't justify dual cpu's you may be disappointed.

 

[Carmine_Paterno]

I really like the vp6...so i might stick to 1 cpu until the new windows comes out...threaded for dual cpu's...but the package i am going to get from www.outsideloop.com comes with 2x P!!! 700's pretested to 933 and 2 x thermaltake golden orbs with the vp6 for 600 and if u want it to be pretested for 1ghz add 40 and if you want alpha 6035 add 40...not a bad package at all huh?

 

[Tim-]

Not too bad. I would recommend going for the better coolers- orbs are not a great solution. My results with them have been poor. I am using PEP66's modified for socket use and they are great.

You might want to check with PC Nut- he has similar systems available and you might save a few bucks.

I'm not sure what Windows you're referring to- if it is a 98 derivative you're thinking of, it's not likely going to support dual cpu's. If it's whistler you're thinking of, it already does support duals.

I'm probably reading something into this, but your mention of the "new" Windows "threaded for 2 cpu's" triggered this thought... Just because an OS is capable of supporting SMP it still requires properly threaded applications to utilize both cpu's. If the application isn't properly threaded, the second cpu just does housekeeping chores while the first processor available at the time runs the application.