A Dual-Processor AMD 64 Motherboard?

[sLydE]

So, i have a few thousand dollars to burn now that i have a job, and since doom3 came out. I wanted to know (after searching the web high and low), if anyone had heard of a dual amd-64 motherboard out there, preferrably with pci-express? if not, how about another suggestion with the dual processors that would be just as powerful. would xeons work, but be way more money in comparison? an atx form factor would be nice, but not required. thanks in advance!

[The Undertaker]

Don't know any boards to recommend but the chipsets are the same for single processor boards (which offer similiar perfermance). I'd defiantly stick with the Operton (no shared FSB and you'll be able to upgrade to multi-threaded processors). Nvidia is probably going to release a dual PCI-E 16x board for their SLI but waiting doesn't seem to a option here. And in case you didn't know the first number in the Operton's model number indicates how many processors you can have in one system.

[sLydE]

didn't know the thing about the model number, thanks

[Looney]

I have searched and found several 32 bit dual setups, but, not 1 64 bit.... It could be that no one has designed one yet.

[jallamann]

Does the Athlon 64 have an SMP core at all?

[Planky]

Only if AMD releases a MP version of the AMD64 chip.

[sLydE]

well, i was also looking at the opteron vs. the xeon, and price-wise, the xeon is looking mighty fine :)

[jallamann]

well, i was also looking at the opteron vs. the xeon, and price-wise, the xeon is looking mighty fine :)
Yeah, damn right! I think I'll buy me a dual 2.4/1MB xeon system with 2 wonderful gigs or RAM... drool, drool...

[sLydE]

yeah, i was looking at a dual 3.2/1mb xeon system with 4 gigs :D

[Tylenol]

Why would anyone need 128 bits of processing power? Isn't that overkill?

[sLydE]

eh, what's it matter? i just want to be able to do some stuff extremely fast for once :p

[Looney]

Why would anyone need 128 bits of processing power? Isn't that overkill?

Lessons are ment to be learned. ;)

Yes, and 10 years ago 20 meg of Ram was unthinkable... "You will never use that much...My God man." :D Bwhahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

"A Hard drive?!?!?!?!?! What, is, that? I have my 5 1/4 floppy I don't need a hard driver jobby." o_O Bwahahahahahahahahaha

[The Undertaker]

Just did a search for Opteron motherboards on Newegg and found some results. If going with a Xeon go with the 533FSB one (Xeon DP I think its called) because the FSB is shared between the processors. You'll be able to get the Tumwater chipset which has dual PCI-E 16x slots so can you go SLI and have dual processors and video cards. You might want to look at this (http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20040514/index.html) but remember D3 is multithreaded so it will be able to take advantage of both processors unlike most today's games.

[sLydE]

yeah, I read that article, i had planned on getting the 533 fsb due to the fact that it has the 1mb cache, and i was looking into a tyan motherboard (http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderi7505.html).

[jallamann]

Hmm... I was thinking about an Asus PC-DL Deluxe (http://www.asus.com/products/server/srv-mb/pc-dl/overview.htm) that's probably kicking some serious rear...

[doomdiz]

mmmmmmm.....grgl grgl grgl :)

[Tyberious]

Only if AMD releases a MP version of the AMD64 chip.

or the A64 chips get hardware hacked like the XP chips to work in a MP board. Quite useful if you want to cut the cost but I recommend updating the bios along with some pretty decient heatsinks. I have loads of guides on my computer about hardware hacking, even a pentium 4 guide on hwo to increase the voltage up to 1.85 max.

[The Undertaker]

Too bad we'll never see that though. There is only 1 HT link in the A64. Looks like the days of cheap SMP are gone. Hopefully dual core desktop processors get here sooner rather than later.