My PC - Upgrade/Repair Opinions Wanted

[Himself]

I think parallel processing will eventually be more of the norm, sure. If you get some benefit out of a dual cpu config today, great, personally, I don't see the need yet.
WinNT/2K will have to become standard first to get some half decent multitasking and Win9x/Me/You/He/She/They will have to be dead and buried.

I wouldn't make any predictions about 10 years from now though, I wouldn't predict what will happen in 2 years time.

[Brian R.]

Other than games, I will never be confused with a power user. Complexity without significant benefit is unwise. The future is uncertain and I am not going to predict what I may do in 5 years. In the forseeable future, there is no percentage in SMP for me.

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

They better. But which is faster, a computer with two 250 MHz processors (with SMP) or one indentically manufactured 500 MHz processor with the same fsb, same mb architecture, etc? I am under the impression the 500 will be faster. I'd like to see some benchmarks on this...

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

[Gurm]

Honestly, it depends on the OS and what else is running. I can synthesize situations in which the SMP machine doubles the performance of the other machine. In general, you can take a dual-500 machine and a 1ghz machine, set up all your system processes to run on CPU 0, and then run something else on CPU 1.

But that's not the point. Getting beyond synthetic benchmarks...

If you are heavily accessing disks and devices (i.e. doing video editing, music editing, etc.) the dual-cpu machine will perform better. Sometimes this means faster, sometimes it means "not as slow". The difference is like in Q3 when your minimum frame rates determine how good/crappy your experience is, not your maximum frame rates.

Or, if you are running a server... and you have two Pentium Pro CPU's running NT4 server, I'd take that over a single P3-500 any day of the week. It'll be MUCH faster. But that's the magic of Pentium Pros.

- Gurm

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

[Brian R.]

Gurm - What's special about pentium pros? Never used them or read anything of importance about them...

[DentyCracker]

Pentium Pros were optimised for NT code, id est they were designed to run NT, kind of like how the Motorola G4 chip was designed to run Photoshop

[Maggi]

Originally posted by Gurm:
... The BP6 is limited at the 533's, AFAIK ...

Who told you that ?

I'm asking, because officially my MoBo doesn't support Cu- & Celemines at all (compatibility list in Asus' website), but the only thing I had to do was raising the VCore from default 1.5 above 1.7 in order to get my Cel566 running ...

Isn't the BP6 also a BX board ?

Cheers,
Maggi

[dZeus]

the BP6 has some rewiring done, so that you can run dual celerons by default.

The last time I heard, it needed PowerLeap Neo convertors to drive a Celeron-2/Coppermine in it, and Dual Coppermine also was not supported.

Maybe there have been found ways to run dual coppermine by now?

Yes, it does use the i440BX chipset

[Gurm]

The current state of affairs is that the BP6 can run a SINGLE Coppermine. The only way to make it run DUAL coppermines (or celery2's) is to do some extensive soldering. And even then it's not 100% guaranteed... some boards seem to not do it well.

- Gurm

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

[Maggi]

Sorry to hear that ... I was hoping a bit of tweaking could help you ...

Cheers,
Maggi