Dual P4 Motherboard

[gizard]

I have not built my own PC for a while and as such I'm a bit out of date with technology.

Can someone tell me If you can actually get a Dual P4 Motherboard or not? As far as I can assertain you can only buy a Dual P4 Xeon motherboard?

[stuuu]

I think Xeon's are the only current intel cpus that can be paired up. I've heard some motherboard manufacturers are bringing out cheap Dual Xeon boards but the processors are still expensive.

[mr_yogi]

P4s and P4 Xeons are bassically the same but only the Xeons can operate in multi processor mode, and i'm sure they have a different socket too (many more pins). The problem with the Xeons is that in addition to being more expensive (though not as much as they used to be) than the normal P4s, becuase of all the extra testing Intel does on the chips, they are actually quite behind the P4 desktops in terms of speed. To be honest unless you really need SMP (heavely use dual threaded applications) then you would probably be better off with a fast desktop P4.

I don't think the Xeons have even reached 800MHz front side bus yet, and they are also paired with slower memory. Strange as it may seem a P4 @ 3GHz (800MHz fsb + Dual DDR 400 memory) would be much faster then a pair of Xeons @ 3GHz (533MHz fsb + Dual DDR 266 memory) in most cases.

Also the desktop P4s also have Hyperthreding technology which makes them a bit faster agian on multi threaded software.

Or you could take a look at AMD.

[gopher]

mr_yogi said:

Or you could take a look at AMD.

My Brother is currently running a duel opteron system, mainly for video encoding, and it shifts at that + many other apps.

[MEMSDesign]

mr_yogi said:

To be honest unless you really need SMP (heavely use dual threaded applications) then you would probably be better off with a fast desktop P4.

Have to disagree with you there. Dual processors are very useful indeed, and not just in the case of software which can exploit both processors. For example - if you're doing some serious number crunching - you've still got a whole processor left to do work with i.e. writing a report or whatever. You can lock up a processor with something tricky- which would pretty much disable a single processor machine, and be in a position to continue as normal. Makes them more stable too.

Hyperthreading is not quite the same - you can still only bring the total resources of a single processor to bear. I've always used dual processor machines, and would be loath to go back to a single processor.

[mr_yogi]

While you can run separte tasks on each processors, when I had dual P3s I used to find the task consuming one of the processors also used to consume a lot of the other system resources such as hard disk writes, memory bandwidth etc. so the free processor wan't running anywhere near optimal. But that was Windows 2000 and two CPUs sharing PC133

All depends on the applications used.

[gizard]

Thanks for the reply ppl.

I too have used a Dual P3 machine and found it to tie p on processor and with say video editing and leave the other reasonaly free to do other things with. Whearas with a single processor PC - with video editing the whole PC comes to a grinding halt.

I'm currently pondering whether or not to get:

3.2GHz(PG-800FSB) OEM Intel Pentium® 4 CPU 2M Cache
or
3.4GHz (PG-800FSB) HT Pentium® 4 CPU 512k Cache
with appropriate MB

or
3.06GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 Xeon™ 533FSB CPU 1MBK Cache (Prestonia) X2 with appropriate MB
or
3.06GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 Xeon™ 533FSB CPU 512K Cache (Prestonia) X2 with appropriate MB

[steve-p]

I would go for twin Xeons. That's what I have one of my work PCs and it's a revelation compared to any single processor setup. I also have RAID5 15K SCSI drives in it and it is really quick.