Dual Processors

[Fuzzylogik]

Howdy all. I just put together a PIV, 2.53 Ghz machine with a Gigabyte GA-81EXP motherboard last September. Thus far, everything has been great except that when I'm running high-end stuff (mostly games), I'm running into CPU throughput ceilings, which is slowing me down. Since I'm running WinXP Pro, I thought I would install a dual processor motherboard, but I'll be damned if I can find one. Did I miss a memo? Has Intel stopped supporting dual processors other than in Xeon processors or am I just blind?

Thanks for your help.

Fuzzylogik

 

[mechBgon]

You're correct, Intel's dual-capable CPU is the Xeon, or else the Tualatin-S Pentium3 if you can still find them (512kb L2 cache only, if you want SMP). Dual-Xeon boards are starting at about $350 or thereabouts. They won't take a Pentium4, different socket pinouts.

But if you're gaming, dual won't help anyway. Games are not generally SMP-aware, so the two CPUs will simply compete for threads and you'll see 50% utilization on each CPU. If you were trying to play a game while encoding video in the background, well then SMP would be just the ticket (given enough RAM).

If you want high gaming performance, you should replace your old i845E motherboard with an i865 board like an Asus P4P800, and dual-channel DDR400 memory (I would get Corsair XMS3200C2). If you can afford it, you could replace the CPU with one of the 800MHz-based models too, perhaps a 2.8C or 3.0C.

What games are you playing that are being limited by your CPU and not your video card, by the way... flight simulation, real-time strategy, or ???

Welcome to the Forums, by the way

 

[Fuzzylogik]

Thanks! The games I play most these days are C&C Generals and UT 2003. I like the higher-end graphics (duh), which is why I splurged with the Radeon 9700 when it was first released, but I'm still running at 100% CPU usage and it does drag at certain times, hardly always. I've got 1GB RAM (Mushkin high-end 2100, fastest the MB could handle when I bought it) and I'm nowhere near using all of it during games. AGP clocking is maxed, although I just realized that I had set anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering a little too high. Any thoughts about streamlining this config?

Fuzzylogik