SMP geeks?? Helloooooo!!

[vicarious]

Howz it......

just wondering are there any SMP Geeks out there and wondered if any of you wind up the clocks on you dual boxes.

if so let us all know here with your specs

eg

Chip (AMD,Intel or whatever)........(intel sSpec too if possible)
Rated Clk Spd
OC'd Clk Spd
FSB (eg 133 * 10.5)
MOBO brand and Chipset.
Cooling type (Air/Water)
Stablity (must complete sandra cpu bench)


Sweet

Laters

[Ragnor]

I used to have BP6 with dual celerons back in the day and then a VP6 with P3's 500mhz... but SMP is just too expensive thesedays.. the vast majority is not running SMP

What benefits mostly from SMP.. let see Databases, www serving, background services, etc... mostly stuff that matters for servers and doesn't really for desktops / gamers.

I did hear recently that Abit was considering a new SMP board that would put SMP in reach of the geek / enthusiast masses.

[City_Idiot]

i wounder if that nforce smp boared will ever see light of day

[vicarious]

I think SMP has many performance benefits.

Multi threaded apps run faster

while a single threaded app is running consuming as much resources as it can you stil have head room to continue doing other things and you dont notice any slow down.
the quake3 engine has SMP capability.

Photoshop is a big one, I get insane speeds with this app that I just couldnt get on my single XP machine.

SMP allows you to do alot of things at once without slowing down.
like encoding divx and still being able to use other high perfomance apps.
also copying large files from disk to disk uses almost no resourses

my new machine is going to be a dual Athlon XP
to get athlons to run like MP's you need to close the one of the L5 bridgessee here (http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/articles.hwz?cid=2&aid=393&page=2)

Paradigm PC's has a good dual athlon board for $500
and XP's arnt that expensive.

here (http://www.2cpu.com/) is a good site for SMP stuff where they review boards and other stuff.

Overclocking is great but SMP will give you fast stable performance.
you do need to start with good processors first, a early celeron is not going to give you much headroom, but with Piii or Athlon you cant go wrong.

the P4 is arse. full stop. no if's buts or maybe's.
although thier hyper threading technology has potential.

I think Intel needs to focus on finding better ways to process data instead of just trying to do it the same way but at a faster speed.

bring on that AMD opteron.......... finally we get 64bit technology in our CPU's
sparc, mac and sgi have had it for years, what took so long?

[varkk]

The simple fact is that for most users it is not worth the cost of getting dual CPU's as you need a good SMP board, and then you need not one, but two CPUs and either mod them if they are XPs(no garrantee it will work) or buy the insanely priced Athlon MP or intel Xeon. For that expense most of us are better off with a faster single CPU, with more RAM and a faster vid card. Also as hyper-threading becomes more common and more apps/games are built to take advantage of it similar advantages from SMP systems will be available to P4 users.

[vicarious]

good point.

price is probably the biggest issue when it comes to building a system that will meet your needs.

I run a lot of video/audio editing software and it generally supports multi-threading.........

I have been through many computers in the past.....AMD XP2200+, Intel Celerons/Piii and all have provided good burst speed (fast while only doing one thing at a time).
I threw out my XP for my current system because it allowed several things to happen.

1) Faster transfer on PCI bus (Until peak reached)
2) Faster RAID performance
3) Better Memory performance
4) Less lock ups due to an app hogging CPU time.
5) far superior dual monitor perfomance.

all the above things gave my PC a huge boost, and the one thing that gave me the most noticable perfomance boost was the memory performance. I would take fast RAM over a fast CPU any day. and its no wonder why fast ram is expensive.
Mine are Corsiar CL2 modules running in 4way bank interleave.


I aggree that MP's and especially XEONS are stupidly expensive.
I can understand why XEONS are expensive, cause they are a totally different chip with several enhancments
but MP's are just higher rated XP's with an unlocked multiplier and the fourth L5 bridge is intact. cant really justify the expence

BTW I have performed many bridge connects for overclocking and SMP on XP's without a hitch, only a steady hand is needed and a good magnifieing glass.
Older XP's have the 4th L5 bridge intact.

Yes you will have to pay more for an SMP system, but you really do get what you pay for.

A fast CPU is great but you can still only do one thread at a time.
A fast CPU is great but a slow Hard drive will just the leave the CPU idle most of the time, ATA 100 RAID 0 is cheap and you can get insane speed out of it.
Why have a swap file when you can just get more RAM?
Get enough RAM to stick the swap file in a RAM drive?
Faster RAM will enable your CPU to work harder and faster, the faster it pics it up the faster it can process it.
Benchmarks are good but they are synthetic and dont really give a good indication of overall system perfomance, things like boot times transfering files, running 30 IE windows and scanning for viruses while compressing the matrix and ripping the soundtrack on the fly. hehe

things like sandra a good for measuring but pretty useless for perfomance testing and load testing.
for starters the CPU tests MIPS, millions of instructions per second. some CPU's have different instructions how can you compare, what intructions is it carrying out? intructions that 50clk cylces or 100 clk cycles??


food for thought........my 2 cents........etc etc.


dam fine choice of beer BTW

[RTY]

You need to buy a good power supply which is yet another cost.

[Ragnor]

Yeah it's the old cost vs performance choice...

Don't forget 2 decent HSF's or Waterblocks and ECC ram is recommended.

[dumass]

Id rather spend the bling on a decent grafix card :-/