amd smp mobo's

[Donkee]

I know there are some AMD fanatics around here. I was wondering what ya'll knew about those dual amd smp motherboards. I looking at maybe using one of those for my next system. I can get a S2462NG - Thunder K7 AMD Dual mainboard - Palamino AMD ATHLON MP CPU for $380.

I know win2k supports several types of dual processing but how much improvement do you get? if anyone has this type of board any feed back is greatly appriecated.

[b-man1]

i don't have experience with this particular mobo...but i can offer my opinion on SMP use at home.

win2000 will utilize both cpu's, but 99% of the software you run at home is not written to utilize SMP...so performance increases will be negligable (or at least will not justify the price difference). now there are exceptions:

1. if you are running a web server from home that has alot of traffic
2. you have a huge database server (FTP, Oracle, SQL Server, etc) that serves tons of clients
3. Photoshop, CAD, other apps like that that can use the dual cpu's
4. Quake 3? i think that's the only game that uses SMP, but it's not that efficient.

soooo, besides bragging rights, i don't know if i could justify the expense. ???

you could use the $$$ on a high-end system and still save $$$.


.02

[Jim Z]

Donkee, wait if you can. Tyan is releasing a lower cost 760MP board within a month, it is a standard ATX board which uses a standard ATX 2.03 power supply, and has UDMA/100 RAID on board. Should be about $250 or so.

[Kakarot]

Yea, AMD is working on a lower cost 760MP chipset right now. Should be out soon. I'd wait.

Also, Win2k will load balance between both CPU's whether the program is SMP or not. It's a little more efficient if the program is written for it, but win2k will still do it for you. You can check yourself. Run a game that you know isn't SMP(pretty much all of them)... hit ctrl alt del to get to task manager and look at the performance tab. you should see both CPU's working.