I'm considering purchasing a dual Athlon board in the next few months, I was looking at the Tyan S2466N Tiger MPX. I've seen some places it supports Athlon XPs and MPs both, the MPs cost a fair amount more, and I haven't really heard much argument in favor of using them. However, I have heard that using the XP CPUs, the board is unstable. Does anybody know the truth? Should I pay the extra for the MP cpus or are XPs a better choice? Thanks for the advice. [Edit: My main system is a 1gHz tbird, hence why I am considering upgrading. I will probably be getting a new video card too, my Radeon VIVO is showing it's age finally.]
right. for dual processors, you will need MP processors, using XP's will make your system very unstable. although, i do not advise getting dual proccesors just yet, it would be a waste of money, seeing that not alot of applications support Multi Processing yet. so i would just stick to a single XP2100 if i was you also, i dont know what the rules are around here, but at my boards, that sig would be far too big, maybe the mods would like to comment on it. thanks, .icecube
Ahh there is nothing like a dualie setup...as someone said before its "creamy goodness" You can run dual XP's on most boards, but if its a newer XP then it will not work (AMD is forcing you to get the MP's). Only reason that the older works is because there is no difference between an xp and mp. Also you will not receive tech support for dual XP's if it matters to you. I have an asus a7m266-d and it is a good board. I would say stick with either the asus, tyan, or iwill...they seem to be the most stable. I'm using mp1800+ and i think the price is "fair" ($158 for US peeps). Good luck!
Monolith - Mr. Sibson did a pretty good job of answering the MP vs XP question. My understanding is that the XP can be used in place of the MP on dual boards but AMD doesn't support it. I agree with icecube about the applications supporting the dual processors. Your operating systems of the NT generation 4.0 and higher support it but you won't get much of an advantage if your applications can't address both processors. icecube - the moderators are very familiar with monolith... I wouldn't sweat his siggy... [edit] Scope was quicker to the draw... doh!
Oops..sorry eddie I have to disagree abit on the SMP issue. Even though most proggies are not smp enabled..windows is. The load can be distributed between the 2 cpu's, even when an app is taking up a single cpu. And quake 3 is smp enabled...i know this would make koolvin happy You would have to push a dualie HARD for it to slow down..
That's Sibson... Iwill and Asus are both new to the dual-board world. Stick to an established manufacturer, such as gigabyte, Tyan or Supermicro. icecube is not entirely correct in his view of software. Dual-cpu software has been around for quite a long while. The reason it isn't commonplace is because not many applications benefit from it, and thus are not programmed to do so. There are two aspects to program execution speed. Response time and Throughput. Dual CPUs improve throughput, not response time. An increase in clock speed improves both. Since in most applications you're more worried about response time, dual-cpus do not help. If stability is your concern, then the MPs are worth getting. They are certified for dual-cpu operation, and AMD's dual-cpu setups have traditionally not been the paragon of stability. Depends what your priorities are. If you want a powerful, STABLE system, perhaps the best choice right now is the 1.4GHz PIIIS 512K (which will outperform 2GHz Willamette P4s under some conditions). Low heat, mature, stable platform, highly optimised software, etc. Unfortunately, about £300 a throw....
Thats true..iwill is a new player in the dualie world. But asus has been making dual boards for a while already (P2B-D was a kick arse board ) I really wouldn't recommend the gigabyte GA-7DPXDW because it was a horrible board (returned it very quickly)..more info at 2cpu forums if you wanna read about it. IsaacSibson is right though..the p3 dual boards are probably the most stable..the dual athlon boards are sorta "finicky". But the speed is crazy...encoding divx's on it is REAL fast
All bow down to Isaac! Is there anything he does not know? Many a conversation we've had about such matters on mIRC. Why not drop in, monolith? All are welcome!! \/ \/ \/ siggy \/ \/ \/
Thank you to all that responded. The question wasn't whether or not I would benefit from a dual processor system, I _know_ I would. I run FreeBSD primarily, and I do heavy code development using threading and so on. I have a bunch of multiple-cpu systems up at Verio (27 to be exact) that I administrate, but as I did not have to pay for them, I was not too concerned about Athlon MPs over XPs, nor about stability as I could simply buy new motherboards if the old ones proved unstable. My primary question concerned XP vs. MP cpus in a dual-setup, and, by in large, it has been answered. I've also found from other sites that registered ram, even though not required on the Tyan motherboard, will greatly increase stability. Non-registered can only be run in slot 1 and 2 of the motherboard. I appreciate all of the helpful information. As for my signature, I will talk to Moose and Kna about it and see if they think I should shorten it or not, I did not realize it was offending/bothering people. Thank you for pointing it out. Cheers.
Ok, changed the bottom half of the sig to size=1, hopefully that will make it more acceptable. I didn't talk to Moose/Kna about it yet, I figure that will make a good compromise in the meantime.
ECC is an absolute must with the Tyan board. My landlord has the older 760MP tyan tiger board. He initially tried to run non-ECC memory in the first slots, as you mentioned is supposedly possible. It would not correctly install windows at all with that memory in it. When replaced with ECC, the system became much more stable. Do not even bother trying to run without ECC. As I mentioned, it might be worth looking into P3S chips, which although not as powerful as Athlon chips do carry a greater L2 cache (512K) and many present pieces of software are highly optimised for the P6 platform. In some situations, dual P3S 1.4GHz 512K chips have been seen to out-perform dual 2GHz Xeon systems. Motherboards that spring to mind are the Intel SDS2 for the high-end, and Gigabyte GA-6VXTD for the low-end.
I was wanting to get an SMP rig as well but decided to wait until the new Opteron boards come out later in the year (or probably early next year). If you can wait you might wanna think about that considering that the memory management should be much better. The AMD 762MPx is showing its age when compared to the new VIA chipsets, especially in applications that don't use SMP.
I think It'd be clear that monolith know what he's doing if he wants to buy a dual system, so that's indeed something that shouldn't be questioned. I'd buy a pentium-system too if I'd go dual for stability. If I'd go for cheapness and leetness, then I'd simply buy a dual board with XP's, as MP's are extremely expensive. I was considiring a dual too, but because the OC-capabilities are limited, I went back to single with watercooling and fridge.
