Degree of Win2k SMP Issues?

[Gurm]

Folks,

I'm thinking of upgrading to an SMP system. I have two questions...

1. What's the best SMP board out there? I really like my P3B-F, but ASUS seems to only offer the P2B-D.

2. How show-stopping are the SMP glitches in the current G400 drivers? Can they be worked around by turning off one of the processors when game-time comes up? Or in some other manner? Or are they really "don't play Quake3 on an SMP machine, period" type problems?

Let me know. Thanks.

- Gurm

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

[paulcs]

I have a Asus P2B-D and it's a great board. It is preposterously expensive for a vanilla dual processor motherboard, and certainly brings nothing particularly innovative to the table. In fact, there are only four PCI slots, unless Asus has recently added another. It is, however, very stable and was a dream to install. No muss. No fuss. Worked the first time around.

In my experience, it is a crappy overclockers' board. I don't mind jumpers, but I couldn't get my two PIII 500's (Katmai) to overclock by more than 15 MHz. The CPU's were fine at 560 MHz on single processor boards.

Very Important: I believe Asus has only recently updated the board for Coppermine support. I bet there are *a lot* of P2B-D's out there that won't properly support the Coppermine. If you decide to take this route, I think you should make absolutely certain you're getting a revision that does. I think I'm at the end of my upgrade path as far as my board goes.

I upgraded from a P2B-F. Although I always reinstall Windows after a motherboard upgrade, if I'm using the same chipset, I'll boot into Windows the first time using the previous install. In every case, except this one, Windows reinstalled the various components of the motherboard. In this case, Windows acted as if nothing had happened. (I, of course, reformatted my hard driver immediately afterwards and installed Windows 2000.)

I've never used a P3B-F, but I was happy that the P2B-D was so similar to the P2B-F. At the risk of admitting that I'm a complete idiot, I once accidently flashed a P2B-F with a P2B-D's BIOS. The board appeared to work find, although I didn't keep it that way for long.

Supermicro and Tyan also have very good reputations as far as dual CPU motherboards go. Except for price, the Asus board being far more expensive, the issue will remain the same. Make sure they have Coppermine support and don't expect to do a lot of extreme overclocking.

I have litte first hand knowledge of the G400 in W2K. I tried it with the beta drivers, didn't like it, and switched boards. I had a TNT2 Ultra on my dual CPU system for a while and had SMP problems only when I enabled the feature in Quake 3. NVidia has better support now, and I eventually had it working. I think the G400 SMP issues are more extensive. I'm using a G200 now and have given up trying to play games in W2K. All that sturn and drang over one damn game just wasn't worth it to me.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[MarkA]

I'm running a Tyan Tiger 100 S1832DL and have had no problems with the board, especially when interacting with 2000. Just be sure to use the latest BIOS for full ACPI support.

I have a G400Max in now - and like others, experience a few SMP problems with the current driver set. Like you said, a quick setting of the processor affinity for that process and I've been able to run everything just fine. I've actually picked up the framerate on some games over 98.

--Mark