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**Gurm** · 14 November 2000, 10:42

Oh... and yes, I purposely didn't list my monitor. I have a handle on a nice 21" for $400 (long story) so that's a non-issue.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

**Brian R.** · 14 November 2000, 12:27

If you gave me that system, the first thing I would do would be to install an ASUS CUSL2 with a PIII 800EB. There's alot of available and unshared PCI slots and, for me, that's the name of the game. I always fill up my PCI slots. Note that you'd have to give up one of the sticks of RAM.

[This message has been edited by Brian R. (edited 14 November 2000).]

**Maggi** · 14 November 2000, 12:44

Swap those Mendocinos to a pair of Celemines ...

Don't know though if the new Cellys are capable of SMP, if not, go for two Cumines.

Best thing about that path imho is that you can keep all of your existing hardware while doubling your performance.

Cheers,
Maggi

**Gurm** · 14 November 2000, 13:45

Brian:

Once you've had SMP you never go back. Sorry, pal. A CUSL2 is right out.

Maggi:

See, that's the problem. The BP6 is limited at the 533's, AFAIK. *sigh* And there are no other GOOD SMP boards that aren't VIA. And that's a can of worms I'd rather not open if it can be avoided.

*sigh*

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

**Himself** · 14 November 2000, 13:49

I would guess that some of the drivers for Win2K are not up to par.

Look at the video, sound, mb, and I/O controllers for stability issues, other than that, check the bios and windows setups. The rest of the hardware should either work or not work, not cause instability. Performance is a separate issue, if you want to upgrade, I'm sure you can figure it out yourself.

**Gurm** · 14 November 2000, 14:33

Himself,

Yeah, I haven't done much other than rearrange the hard drives though, although it could be a BIOS issue since I tried flashing it with the newest one (mobo) and then flashed back due to incompatibility. It could very well be a lingering issue there.

Basically, I'm putting together a new machine for someone, and if someone knew of a good stable dual-board to trade up to... I'd do it.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

**DuRaNgO** · 14 November 2000, 14:49

<font size=+4>RAID!</font size>

[This message has been edited by DuRaNgO (edited 14 November 2000).]

**Himself** · 14 November 2000, 14:54

Yep, to be sure, write down all your bios settings, turn off the power to the computer, jumper the bios rom for 30 seconds and put the jumper back, power up and then go in to the bios and set everything up again, IRQ's etc. But you probably already know how to do that..

**dZeus** · 14 November 2000, 17:10

The BP6 is limited at the 533's, AFAIK. *sigh* And there are no other GOOD SMP boards that aren't VIA. And that's a can of worms I'd rather not open if it can be avoided

If you like to upgrade your CPUs in the future, then I would advice buying either the Epox KP6-BS or the Asus P2BD.

Due to the BP6 being Abit's first Pentium-2/-3/Celeron class SMP board, it is notorious for it's problems, and if you get everything to work properly with it (of possible), it is great, but if it is not possible (which is currently the case if I understand correctly), or if you want to upgrade to CuMines SMP in future, then I would buy one of the above boards.

The Epox supports CuMines for sure, and the Asus I am almost sure of. The Epox is much cheaper then the Asus (Asus is notorious for selling _very_ expensive SMP boards), but lacks any overclocking capability. However, it has been tested as _very_ stable by many sites, and I've read that a Australian university actually built a supercomputer buy having a linux beowulf cluster, consisting of about 800 Coppermine 600MHz SMP systems, all containing this very Epox board.

Another point you should check on these mainboards, is wether they will do PCI/4 at 133MHz FSB.

If I would do an upgrade on that system, I myself would buy the Epox board, 2 high quality FC-PGA -> Slot-1 adaptors (iWill slocket-3), 2 golden orbs (or similar/better coolers), and a pair of 700Mhz Coppermines of the cC0 stepping, and run the whole setup at 933MHz SMP.

The only thing you would be overclocking at that speed (apart from the CPU) is the videocard, but since you have a G400, there is a high probability that it should work just fine at 89MHz AGP.

I myself bought such a Coppermine 700E cC0 stepping just 2 weeks ago, and it did 933MHz without even a voltage overclock. I think the yields on the cC0 stepping are so high that 933MHz is almost guaranteed (never can be to sure though). Running at 933MHz, I am even overclocking dirt-cheap PC100 RAM to 133Mhz, and at CAS-3 it works just fine. My G400 by default runs at 1x AGP when I have the FSB set to 133MHz (=89MHz AGP), but I also tested my G400 at 100Mhz AGP (also 1x), and at 100Mhz it was completely stable. So I forced it to 2x AGP at 89MHz, and haven't had a single crash or graphic glitch related to this yet.

Good luck upgrading your system, I hope I was of some help to you! (p.s. if you don't have the money for the whole upgrade I mentioned, you can always upgrade the mainbord first, and the CPUs later (and I heard that cC0 stepping isn't availble everywhere yet. Pay close attention to the S specs on the coppermines to figure out the stepping).

**Brian R.** · 14 November 2000, 18:29

Sorry - Just my opinion. I'll never even try it.

**Gurm** · 15 November 2000, 08:02

Brian... believe it or not, yes you will. Speaking from a computer theory perspective... all computers will be concurrent multiprocessing PC's within a few years.

HOWEVER, they may merge multiple chips into one core in the future. I dunno.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

**Brian R.** · 15 November 2000, 08:31

Why should anyone buy or make exclusively multiple processor pcs? By definition, the speed of multiple processor pcs may only advance at the same rate as the individual processors making it up. There is no indication that dual processor pcs will have the ability to run multiple processors faster than the sum of the two processor speeds. No thanks, I'll stick to one. I don't forsee the need for an additional layer of complexity. Just looking for trouble if you ask me.

BTW, In your rant about lack of OGL support, weren't you also bemoaning the non-existant dual-processor support by Matrox in W2K not long ago? Sounds like another example of an additional complexity associated with dual processors to me. Forget it.

IMHO

[This message has been edited by Brian R. (edited 15 November 2000).]

**dZeus** · 15 November 2000, 12:12

Advance in speed in CPU designs will inevitably be slowed down as the speed of developing new CPU-architectures overtakes the speed of new manufacturing processes (SP?).

Going multiple CPU will increase speed with little efforts... so yes, we will end up with SMP systems sooner or later in the average desktop PC.

IBM already is busy developing a Power4 architectures that incorperates 4 cores into one physical die, with large amounts of cache that function as buffers between the cores. AMD and Intel also has been said to be busy working on server chipsets that incorperate multiple cores into one physical die.

**Gurm** · 15 November 2000, 12:21

Brian,

I'm not talking today or even in the next year. I'm saying that 10 years from now, nobody will make a single-cpu solution anymore.

Computer theory is progressing to the point where multithreading is the norm, even for simple tasks. Multiprocessing can netyou incredible speed gains, believe it or not. Even under Win2k. But programs must be written to take advantage of it.

Even with Win2k, my dual-celeron 533 will outperform many machines running much faster - in your average windows stuff. Not games, which are all written single-processor (or even single threaded!).

The fact that Quake3 only nets a 10% boost on a dual-cpu machine is not due to SMP being bad, it's due to only SOME of the processing time being load-balanced in Q3 (it was Carmack's first attempt at multiprogramming).

Photoshop, 3D Studio, and Office apps all go MUCH faster on an SMP machine.

And new OS's such as BeOS are being designed from the ground up for multiprocessing. It's the wave of the future. It will happen.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

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