Dual Board

[MrP]

Hullo,

am looking to buy a dual board in the next couple of months.

anyone know what the expected arrival times are for ABIT's and co's dual duals for the XP, also anyideas on specs, prices, weather to bother with them or not?

toodles :xsofa:

[dicki]

i have no idea on arrival times. the ones out at the moment are 2* tyan boards and an asus one.

prices are hovering around the £220 for the "standered" boards with the server class ones (built in scsi raid controller 2* ethernet etc etc) are about £500 odd

specs look good...lots of room for ddr, use of registered and un registered dimms... XP's are *sometimes* compatible this is definatly luck of the draw as amd have supposedly asked for this to be stopped.

regarding wether it's worth it or not... it all depends what you want it for... if you buy a dually and expect a sudden vast increase in gaming speed or even windows applications you will be disapointed... games can actually run slower because the cpu's are fighting for cache and bus time and windows apps will be a touch quicker but not much... you will see massive improvements in multitasking though... if your running a dozen apps in the back ground you'll have no trouble where a normal system would be struggling and if you use certain raytracing or modelling packages advantages can be seen there

hope this helps

dicki

www.2cpu.com

[MrP]

Hi,

thanks for that dicki.

the machine will be apure crunching machine for seti/RC5 and the like. But basically i want the most tweakable board, as i intend on putting dual XP1800's on it, with the hope of getting them clocked up to the 2000 mark (not 2 gig, but a theoretical 2000 if you follow me)

the reviews i have read so far for the asus board, and the MSI board say that they dont have the facility to change the voltage in the BIOS, which i would think is a pretty basic need for overclocking
toodles :xsofa:

[dicki]

very true abuot the voltages, however if you think back to the days of the first socket a boards and remember the tricks you could do to the other bridges then you'll find it pretty easy to set the voltage straight to 1.85volts

i saw a test on a clocked asus board and they got the fsb to an easy 150mhz with no increase in voltage... i think it packed up at 153/155 in the end

dicki

[MrP]

Dicki,

am aware of the tricks with the bridges, but it seems likevery hard work with the XP, and i dont really fancy knackereing my frist decent chip with a crayon!

would like to wait and see what abit bring out, cos if its half as good as the BP6, and VP6 are supposed to be, it should be one hell of a board

toodles :xsofa: