Motherboards A question about dual socket mobos

Hi everyone.

I was getting into a convo with my friend who is a budding sound producer and who wants to get serious with his work with music and doing 3d animations

He wanted to upgrade his machine, but hes is a little low on funds and hardware is real expensive for mauritians (even on a good salary)

What I was suggesting was a gradual upgrade, with a new piece of hardware every month.
That way he could start slow and gradually build up a monster.

Anyway, two questions popped up.

1) Are there dual socket 1156 mobos around? (which offer cheaper xeons than the 1366 socket)

2) do you need to have both cpu sockets filled for a dual mobo to work?

I don't have much knowledge about server type hardware so any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

1) No there aren't, the socket 1156 Xeons are the 3 series and don't support dual processor boards
2) Yes, you can only fill 1 socket then upgrade at a later date to dual processors

 

Sweet.

I'm kind of surprised, I would have thought that populating only one cpu socket would end in tears.

Thanks for the info

 

Servers are shipped with single processors all the time so you have the option to upgrade later.

In the old days of single core processors it was a pain in the a$$ to upgrade as you had to rebuild the HAL to get it to take the dual chips.
Nowadays it's easy