SMP and G400 in Win 2k

[North]

I am considering buy a dual celeron 366 @ 550 setup off a friend for a good price. And wondered if there are any performance issues with SMP and G400s in Win2k (or NT 4), in general windows use and in Quake 3.

Would I be better off gettin an Athlon 750 instead for performance ?

[Nuno]

Get the Athlon, unless you run some really native multi-threaded apps. Dual 550 doesn´t really equals to 1.1Ghz, you know...

[Gurm]

Current Win2k G400 drivers have issues with SMP. This will be fixed... soon.

- Gurm

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

[Punk]

I have to disagree with Nuno and agree with Gurm...Why?

I have a dual Celeron system myself. Together with my G400 MAX on Winnt 4 (SP6 2x 400@528 celeron) it outperforms Win98SE(TurboGL 1x 400@600 celeron) with Q3A. Especially in Multi-Player game...

Check out my post in Matrox Gaming for Q3A issues

And.. under Winnt 4.0 and W2K programs and games do take advantage over 2 cpu's...for instance I was playing X-wing Alliance(with 'dual force' under W2K) and in my task menu both CPU's showed an even load. The same with other proggies...because it's all in the Hal and Kernel and everything uses that..
If a proggie or game is multithreaded than it rocks even more...

for more info check this link: http://www.hardocp.com/articles/smp/...p/smp_pg1.html

And it's really cheap with an Abit BP6...

And.. by

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What I like about computing?2 much 2 mention

[Laristan]

If you're buying it for games then do so, its good value ... however be warned that DVD doesn't always work smoothly under Windows NT.

Nuno, sorry to say this, but the Athlons suck major in SMP environments. You have to perform so many tweaks to get all sorts of software running correctly right now. Every site I visit I see links to "make this work on Athlon" etc

[Nuno]

Punk, an athlon 750 isn´t quite a celeron 600. A 750 should be faster for general purpose use than a dual 550 celery.

Laristan, I think the doubt here is about a dual celeron vs a single athlon. So who´s talking about smp athlons? You wish...! (Now if could only provide a link to a dual athlon mobo )

[Greebe]

I'd like to see that link myself... Shit a dual Athlon850's hmmm... 1.7 gHz, lookie here another cpu

[Punk]

Hopefully Intel will enable the Solano 815 with smp support. So dual mem pipeline + 4x AGP + PC 133 + DDR? + no rambus!!!So no memory hub. And offcourse an Matrox G800...or G450(MAX?)

I'd buy that for a dollar...

The Wintune results of my system are way higher than every Athlon system( except maybe the Kyrotech freezers)...check the highest ratings...all SMP systems

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What I like about computing?2 much 2 mention

[Nuno]

Punk, I understand that you are proud of your dual-cpu setup. But the way I understand SMP (and I´m not by any means an expert) is: the app needs to be coded with SMP in mind and the advantage it´ll take from the 2nd cpu depends of how good that code is implemented. I don´t know for sure, but I think apps like 3dstudio max, photoshop, something hi-end like that cad/3dmodeling stuff. If you run these sort of apps on a regular basis, that´s good. If not, you are just wasting the 2nd cpu. Yes, windows (NT) may be faster, but how much *noticeably* faster.

[Punk]

Nuno in my experience it did improve a lot. For Example: when I'm developing in Visual Interdev, Frontpage,Photodraw,Vizact and Access opening files and waiting times reduce noticeably.

When I check my task menu the second cpu is used all the time in games and apps that don't use SMP. I they did it would improve even more, but the Kernel of Linux,Winnt4 and W2K use SMP and so it handels threads and processor load more effectively.

More on SMP
http://www.2cpu.com

Offcourse 2 kyrotech @ 1000 Athlons would even be better...Dang!!!

[This message has been edited by Punk (edited 20 January 2000).]